Every cheerleader knows the struggle: trying to balance practices, workouts, games and performances with school, work and the life you try to have outside of cheer. This is nearly impossible to do unless you sacrifice things in your life that are important to you, and I, like almost all cheerleaders, did precisely that.

Becoming a college cheerleader was all I ever wanted starting from middle school and going through high school. It was a dream that I knew I was not going to give up on.

When the spring of my senior year rolled around, I decided that I was going to tryout for a team that I thought I could see myself doing well with and further my skills.

I made the team and I thought that my dreams had come true, but I was wrong.

While the practices, my teammates and the program was everything that I had wanted and dreamed of, I started to crumble under the time commitment that college cheer requires.

No one told me that college cheerleading is about double or triple the time commitment that high school cheer is.

When the school year started, I thought that I was going to be able to be involved in all of these clubs, have a part-time job and have tons of time to study like in high school, but once again, I was wrong.

Cheerleading was all I had time to do outside of school and my scheduled study times.

Between practices, workouts and appearances, I was tired and it was only two months into the fall semester.

It was then that I started realizing that I had all these plans and ideas of what I wanted my college career to look like before I went to school: I wanted to be a student leader, I wanted to be involved in clubs related to my major, I wanted to do volunteer work, I wanted to meet people different from my friends back home.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was sacrificing pieces of myself in pursuit of a dream I was determined to hold on to.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love cheerleading, I am passionate about cheerleading, I have been cheering for over seven years, but when you love something so much you lose sight of what is missing and you make excuses for it.

I made excuses for not pursuing the things I knew I would never be able to pursue again in my life.

“I can’t I have cheer,” was a common phrase coming out of my mouth or, “I don’t think I should because it will probably conflict with cheer,” was my usual thought when an opportunity I wanted to take came my way.

A lot of college cheerleaders get stuck in this rut of having to choose between cheer or other passions they want to pursue, I am happy to say that I chose to pursue my other passions.

This was the hardest decision I had ever had to make at that point in my life and I still get emotional when I think about it.

Every cheerleader has been at a point where they reevaluate their life and don’t know if they can keep cheering. Whether that is due to injury, financial issues, family problems, etc., every cheerleader has had to make that choice at one point in their athletic career.

I made mine after I decided that my self-discovery was more important to me than a dream that I had, had since I was 12 years old.

Getting myself to say the words, “I need to quit cheer,” was almost impossible for me. I saw it as me giving up and walking away from the biggest dream I had ever had. But what I didn’t realize until much later was that was the first step in the right direction for my life.

Now, if becoming a college cheerleader is your dream, go for it. Being able to experience what it is like, for the brief time I was one, has given me some of the best memories of my cheerleading career.

If you already are a college cheerleader and don’t know if you want to continue, think about other things you want to pursue. Are those things more important to you than cheer or is cheer the most important thing to you?

In a perfect world, I would’ve been able to do everything that I wanted to pursue in college, but time constrictions are a reality.

I had to make a choice and I made a choice that has allowed me to do things I would never have been able to if I continued cheering.

I made that choice to save my other passions from being put aside and forgotten about.

I made the best choice of my life and it has given me the ability to pursue other dreams and to dream bigger than I even thought I could.