Tag Archives: cheer program planning

Why Varsity wants Flex gone

Varsity has been pretty consistent in their reasoning. Age-based divisions, they say, create cleaner developmental tracks and clearer evaluation standards. They also pointed at “team culture” and “competitive balance,” which is corporate code for “older kids dominating teams of younger kids isn’t a great look.”

There’s a real argument here. A 14-year-old and a 9-year-old are not the same athlete. Putting them on the same team can blur what each of them actually needs.

The counter argument is also real. Small programs in small towns just can’t always hit roster minimums in strict age bands.

You can have your own opinion on which one wins. Varsity has made the decision for you either way.

What this means for your 2026-27 season

If you already planned to run a Flex team next season, run it. Nothing about the reversal changes your immediate plans. You have one more year to use this format the way you intended.

But if you were going to build a multi-year roster around Flex, stop. The 2027-28 cliff is real, and you need to plan backward from it now. Any athlete you bring into a Flex team in fall 2026 needs a home in fall 2027 without Flex.

That sounds obvious. In practice, gyms screw this up all the time because next August feels far away.

It isn’t.

The age math you need to run before summer

Pull up your projected 2026-27 Flex roster. For every athlete on it, figure out their 2027-28 birth year and what divisions they’ll qualify for in a Flex-free world.

You’re going to find three groups.

Group one is athletes who can move cleanly into a standard age division on a team that will exist anyway. These kids are fine.

Group two is athletes who will age into a division where you can build a team around them. You might need to pair them with kids you don’t have on your roster yet. That means recruiting starts now, not in spring 2027.

Group three is the painful one. These athletes need divisions your gym can’t field a team in, because you’re a smaller program and the numbers just aren’t there.

You have three options for each kid in this group. You can develop them up a level so they can play on a team you do have. You can be honest with the family early so they have time to consider another gym.

Or you can use the 2026-27 season to build a recruiting pipeline that brings in age-eligible teammates for 2027-28.

None of these are quick fixes. All of them work better when you start in May than when you start in October.

The Division 2 reality

If your gym is at or under the 125-elite-athlete threshold, this hits you harder. Flex existed exactly for programs your size. Losing it changes how you have to think about every roster decision for the next 18 months.

The extra year matters here. Use it to either grow your athlete count past the math problem, or to specialize hard in the divisions you can actually compete in. Trying to hold the same shape your gym had in 2025-26 will not work.

What this signal is really about

Pay attention to what Varsity has been doing across the board. They’ve consolidated around stricter age divisions.

They launched the Pro Cheer League with a clean professional age cutoff. They’re partnering with Curv AI to push more objective competitive measurement.

Flex was an experiment in flexibility. The Flex experiment ended quickly. The direction is toward tighter, more standardized division structure, even when that direction makes life harder for smaller programs.

If you build your gym’s strategy assuming Varsity will keep adding loopholes, those loopholes will keep disappearing on you. Build for what’s actually coming.