What does “Hit Zero” mean in cheer?

A cheer score sheet has two halves working in opposite directions. One half awards points for what a team performs — stunts, pyramids, tosses, tumbling, jumps, dance and overall performance, judged on both difficulty and how well it was executed. The other half subtracts deductions for errors and rule violations.

Hitting zero means the second half stayed empty. That's genuinely hard, and it's the standard every coach trains toward, because a single fall can erase a season's worth of extra difficulty. But it says nothing about how many points the routine earned in the first half.

This is why you'll hear coaches celebrate a zero-deduction routine even after a placement the family didn't expect. Those are two different measurements, and both are true at the same time.