“I feel closer to [the cheerleaders] than my teammates from football, baseball and rugby,” Papp said. “We go through fire together. We look out for each other.”

A curious thing happens when young men become cheerleaders: They appear to prioritize the good of the team over the way they grew up thinking guys should behave, according to a new study in the journal Sport in Society.

Co-author Amy Pressland, an education professor at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, said more male cheerleaders — or men who compete alongside women, in general — could strengthen gender relations beyond the sidelines.

She doesn’t advocate total athletic integration — a 200-pound man, for example, shouldn’t be able to bulldoze an 120-pound woman in a rugby match.

Schools, however, should encourage more gender-blended sports, she argues. Girls and boys learn together in the classroom, and women and men share workplaces, but more rarely do members of the opposite sex bond together in athletic environments.