Last season at Cheer Tampa Elite, our team mom — let's call her Jenna — did 14 hours a week of unpaid work. She ran the team's snack rotation. She coordinated hotel blocks for eight competitions. She collected $680 from every family for "gifts and extras." She managed the team's group chat (212 messages on the average day).
All of this is work the gym used to pay a part-time team coordinator to do. About six years ago, gyms across the industry started quietly off-loading it onto a single parent — usually one of the most experienced cheer moms, almost always a working mother — and labeling it "the team mom."
What's actually being asked.
I surveyed 84 team moms across 41 gyms in March. Here's the median workload:
- 12 hours per week during the season
- 18 hours in the two weeks before any major competition
- $420 in personal expenses (unreimbursed) across the season
- Zero formal job description, contract, or accountability structure
At $25/hour — the rate gyms pay their actual office admins — that's
$13,200 of free labor per team. Per season.
Multiply by the ~14,000 all-star teams in the US. The industry is extracting roughly $185M a year of unpaid administrative labor from women whose kids it already charges $20K+ a season.
What needs to change.
- Hire a paid team coordinator. Bake it into tuition. $40/family/month covers it.
- Put logistics in software. TeamSnap, BAND, anything. Stop using the team mom as a human Trello board.
- Cap the "team fund." If your gym needs a $680 slush fund per family, your gym needs new accounting.
Jenna's daughter still got her bows. The team still made bid. The world did not end.