Hundreds of thousands of high school girls put on cheerleading uniforms each year and thousands more continue on to college, taking their place in a thriving American tradition that has been around for nearly as long as football.

While cheerleading evokes images of pompoms and pleated skirts, it has relied on increasingly athletic feats of grace and strength in recent years. As participants have perfected their basket tosses and pyramids, and mounted ambitious floor routines, a complicated and emotional question has arisen: has cheerleading become a true sport?

For many women, especially those who worked at the forefront of the push for equality in college sports, the answer for a long time was no. They feared that calling it a sport sent the wrong message to women — endorsing an embarrassing holdover from a time when girls in tight-fitting outfits were expected to do little more than yell support for boys. Those women were also skeptical of high schools and universities that counted female cheerleaders as athletes as a way to evade their obligation to provide opportunities for women in more traditional sports, like softball and soccer.

But other women bristled at what felt like an insult. Why should cheerleading not be considered a sport when it required a complex set of technical skills, physical fitness and real guts?