I was a junior in high school when I decided to try out for the cheerleading team. I knew a few girls on the team, and I missed doing gymnastics, so I went for what I then thought was the next best thing. At tryouts I felt slightly overwhelmed. Even with my background as a gymnast, I was thrown into a whole new world when I became a cheerleader. Upon making it onto the team as an alternate, my teammates were quick to help me learn all the new terms and skills that had to do with cheerleading. Not only did cheer make me happy, but I was making new friendships and becoming closer with the girls on my team.
It wasn’t until I cheered at my first basketball game and the rest of the school found out about me being a cheerleader that I started seeing firsthand what people thought of my sport. My former soccer coach, who was also the basketball coach and my gym teacher, derisively asked me why I chose to become a cheerleader, and scoffed when I told him I just wanted to. He clearly didn’t believe it to be a sport, and he was one of many. From junior year of high school until now, I’ve been told numerous times by numerous people that “cheerleading isn’t really a sport.” When I’ve asked why they think that, I’m often told that all I do is jump around and shout, occasionally tumbling and stunting. What is amazing to me, is that almost all of the people informing me on “what cheerleading is” actually know nothing about what it meant to be a cheerleader.
Yes, we wear makeup and do our hair and smile during all of the games. However, making ourselves look good is just one tiny part of being on the team. And we absolutely do not look like that at practice. Besides, judging our work ethic and intelligence by the way we look is not only ridiculous, it’s demeaning. If anything, our looking happy while holding someone who weighs about the same as us above our heads for an extended amount of time show just show our grit and strength.
Yes, we do jump around and— at games. Like I said, we don’t look “pretty” at practice. We look sweaty and stubborn. We look frustrated because we can’t get a new stunt to hit. We look annoyed because we just busted our tumbling again, even though we got it last week. We look determined because we aren’t going to let anything stop us from giving it our all and going to national competitions with people that have worked just as diligently as we have.
What we do at games is a very small peek into what we do at competitions. We don’t always do our toughest skills at games, because it’s not necessarily safe to do them on a hardwood floor. Even just doing a back-handspring can hurt your wrists, throwing a skill that you aren’t positive you have on a hard surface is scary and has way too much injury potential to be worth entertaining fans that don’t understand how much work you put into mastering it. Also, we aren’t given the time to do our entire routine in the thirty second timeouts we go out for. As a cheerleader in college, my team just recently had to explain to our trainer what our routine is, because he didn’t realize that it wasn’t just what we do at the games. Our routine is two and a half minutes of us doing intense cardio, peppered with performing our most difficult skills, all while making it look easy.
Cheerleading is a lot of fun and I love it, but it isn’t easy. It’s an important part of my life because of the friendships I’ve made and strengthened through it and the skills I’ve learned by doing it. Being told that it isn’t hard by someone with no experience doing it is not only disrespectful and rude, it’s also ignorant. Please don’t argue with me that it’s easy because you watched thirty seconds of cheerleading at a basketball game and decided that you could do it. You probably couldn’t. I know we make it look easy, but we put in a lot of work to look that way.
