The second season of Cheer can’t make up its mind about whose story it wants to tell, and that indecision has a funny way of mixing up winners and losers.

2: If the Judges Disagree.” Trinity Valley Community College (TVCC), the team that refuses to consider itself an underdog but is treated that way by both the surrounding world and Cheer itself, has prevailed over the dominant Navarro College at the 2021 Daytona cheer championships.

TVCC’s celebratory sprint into the Atlantic Ocean in Cheer’s second season finale is two, maybe three minutes of slo-mo elation, and then the episode pushes them aside to make space for a teary reconciliation between Navarro coach Monica Aldama and former athlete La’Darius Marshall and to again recount all the hardships Aldama has suffered after her team became known around the world.

There was a period of time after the first season of Cheer aired on Netflix that you could not escape the Navarro College cheerleading team.

And yet the second season of Cheer, the nine episodes of which dropped on Netflix on January 12, should not have been about them.

TVCC, the scrappy team with a gigantic chip on their shoulders, hesitancy to smile for the cameras, and simmering dislike of Navarro were the real stars of season two.

Yes, Navarro is talented, and yes, the program tumbled into real-life drama since docuseries creator and director Greg Whiteley filmed the 2018–2019 school year for the first season of Cheer.

And in a Breaking Bad moment, Aldama unloads on her athletes, some of whom barely know her because of limited team interactions resulting from COVID-19 restrictions: “I don’t understand the world that we live in right now that’s so, like, everybody worrying about everybody else, and they’re so hypocritical, honestly … I really don’t need your opinion, thanks,” she says.

When we meet the Athens, Texas, team, Cheer uses a few overhead drone shots to show us how close the schools are: TVCC is only 37 miles east of Navarro in Corsicana, 45 minutes or so by car.

Head coach Vontae Johnson, who used to cheer for TVCC, has only had the position for three years; he’s closer in age to the athletes themselves than he is to assistant coach Khris Franklin, who was the head coach from 2011 to 2017, who hired Johnson to replace him, and who later came back to the program he can’t fully quit.

(In a very endearing moment, Franklin is wearing a TVCC Cardinals T-shirt with a certainly unsanctioned illustration of Heath Ledger’s Joker on it when his best friend’s family surprises him by coming to Daytona.) And unlike Navarro, which allows its cheerleaders to simultaneously serve on All Star teams, TVCC doesn’t allow dual placement.

Come because you want to be the best.” (That warning has particular poignancy given that Cheer approached TVCC for season one, according to Johnson, but was turned down because the coach wanted the team to focus on the sport.)?

Is Aldama doing what’s right by getting her athletes representation because Navarro’s fame is tied to a presumption of victory, or is Johnson doing what’s right by disallowing outside distractions, keeping TVCC’s focus on school and cheer, and riling up their antagonism toward Navarro.

That last point makes for a fascinating subplot that provides direct evidence of how Johnson connects with and mentors his athletes not just in cheer but in how they see the world and place themselves within it.

(It’s giving the street-hockey team from D2: The Mighty Ducks.) This isn’t so much an “eat the rich” analysis as a distinction between the teams’ two approaches: Navarro, which seems to treat the team like a machine and the sport as a business, and TVCC, which treats the team as the young adults they are and the sport as a means of becoming more well-rounded people.

That’s not to say that the athletes on the Navarro team don’t genuinely care for each other.

Cheer takes time to show Franklin, who also works as a cheer competition judge, explaining to TVCC athletes minute scoring breakdowns and slightly adjusting their stunts, providing background information about the actual sport that helps educate both team members and us as viewers.

While Navarro brings back athletes who have already left the program to boost their chances of championship success (a move that crowds out rookies and other veterans from a chance on mat), TVCC ensures that three-year athletes have a spot in their routine before they graduate?

When TVCC and Navarro both make it to Daytona for the 2021 championship, TVCC’s 20-person on-mat team is made up of only two people who have ever been there before and 18 who haven’t?

Cheer spends two episodes in Daytona, and although TVCC comes out on top, Navarro gets more attention in the form of a reconciliation between Monica and Marshall and imagery of the Navarro cheerleaders each wandering off and weeping in loss.

TVCC proved the flaw in assuming success, and their story, in all their puckishness, prickliness, and relatability, deserved more in Cheer season two.