by Bridget Renehan / Milton High School
As a cheerleader, I often receive comments from people who what I do is not considered a sport. During winter sports sign-ups, I receive joke after joke about how it should be considered a club. What I’ve found, though, is that nobody wants to know my opinion: what I think about what I do.
I am not like other cheerleaders on the team. I am not a die-hard tumbler, I don’t like wearing the bows and sparkles, and I don’t like getting all dolled up for a basketball game. Honestly, if you knew me, you would never pinpoint me as a cheerleader. I’ve been able to dribble a basketball since I could walk, and my weekends as a kid were spent going from game to game while my dad refereed and I played in the games: I loved every second of it. I used to be a girl who mocked the cheerers at games. Like all things must, though, my basketball career came to an end when I injured my knee. I planned on joining back up, but I did not have a good relationship with my coach of five years, and I no longer enjoyed playing.
Even I was shocked when winter of freshman year came around and I was on the mats ready to try out for cheerleading. It was a hard decision to make, but I figured I could give cheer a chance, or do nothing with my winter. I used to make the jokes that cheer should just be considered a hobby, or a pastime. That was until I noticed how much work the girls put into it. Now I’m on the other side of the debate. I fully think that cheerleading is a sport. You would, too, if you saw how hard we worked.
Dictionary.com says that a sport is an athletic activity requiring skill. Cheerleading requires more skill than any other sport out there. Think of all that we do: we jump, we dance, we stunt, we chant. The jumps and stunts that we do may not look like much, but we have to work for weeks to get the skill to accomplish them. We condition more than most boys’ sports. Football players go to the gym to lift weights; everyday at practice, we lift people. Girls fly in the air on one leg, with the other held up by their ear, the only thing stopping them from falling to the ground being their teammates beneath them. If that isn’t a skill, then I don’t know what is.