Some may think cheerleading is a sport where we sit around and shake our pom poms. Some may think we are just there to cheer the football team onto their next victory. Some may think it's not even a sport at all. These are all common misconceptions about cheerleading. I have been a cheerleader for five years and it isn't like any other sport or any other kind of team.
Cheer is a sport that requires dedication from every single person at that practice. If one person doesn't show up, many things have to change just to accommodate that person's absence. If one person is lacking in effort it can take a great round and ruin it. You can feel everyone's energy when you are on the floor during a round, and if the energy isn't where it needs to be, neither is the round.
Cheerleading is not the cake-walk that it has been made out to be in movies and on television. We don't just stand there at football games and yell. It could be raining, snowing, or sleeting and we are there for our team.
The biggest part of cheerleading is the adrenaline rush of going out on the floor at a competition. We only get two and a half minutes to prove to the judges that we deserve that trophy. We don't have four quarters, or multiple innings to come back if we fall behind. In cheer if you fall behind by 0.2 points that is still hard to come back from. That little amount of points can determine whether you are first or second place. Your team can put a seamless, perfect round on the floor and you can still lose by that 0.2. That 0.2 can come from the littlest mistake such as a unpointed or flexed toe.
Just like any other sport we run, condition, and run rounds over and over until they are absolutely perfect. The most famous thing a coach can say is, "one more time." When a coach says this, it usually means three hundred more times because they want us to be the best we can be.
Aside from the actual cheerleading portion of this sport, you have your team. My team is my family. I can go to them with any problem and I know they would do anything for me. One of my coaches said this one day at our team dinner, "From the outside looking in it doesn't make sense, and from the inside looking out you can't explain it." This perfectly describes our team. People on the outside are looking at our team and think we are weird because of how we act around eachother, but we see it as perfectly normal. When I go to practice, I am in a room with all of my best friends and I can let loose with all of them.
I hope this changes some of the expectations of cheerleading that are portrayed on movies and television. Cheerleading is made out to be an easy sport for all of the popular girls, but it us so much more than that. We don't stand around yell "go team" and just shake our pom poms, we work jus as hard, if not harder than any other sport there us out there.
