Hello everyone!
I’m going to discuss a topic that I found fitting considering I left for cheer camp today. I am a cheerleader at my high school; this is my second year of school cheer but my third year of cheer overall as I competed on a beginner’s team at my local competitive cheer gym in eighth grade. After participating in the two main types of cheerleading today (competitive aka “all-star” cheer and high school cheer), I feel that I’ve learned a lot about the sport and all its ins and outs. Cheerleaders definitely don’t have the best reputation- being one comes with a lot of stereotypes and assumptions. I want to address some of these and offer my perspective as an average cheerleader.
First, I would like to clear up that cheer is NOT how it is generally portrayed in movies/social media/the average person’s mind, etc. Cheerleaders are not always the popular, stuck-up girls that rule the school and date the football players. Fun fact- I wouldn’t consider myself friends with a single football player. Of course there are going to be a few girls like that, but you can find those types of people anywhere and not just in cheer. In fact, cheer actually has quite a pathetic reputation at my school- people often make fun of the cheerleaders and call them wannabe dance team members. Cheer and dance are VERY different sports (ask any cheerleader or dancer!), but people often view them as similar; at my school, our dance team just has the better reputation since they are a very successful competitive team whereas our sideline cheer team does not compete. Our school does have a competitive STUNT team, but it’s fairly new/lesser known, and I chose not to join it so I can’t say too much about it besides the fact that it’s very intense.
It frustrates me when people make fun of cheer and say that it’s not a real sport. Yes, sideline cheer/non-competitive high school cheer is not really a sport and I totally agree with people who argue that. However, any form of competitive cheer is 100% a sport- in my opinion, one of the most challenging sports out there. Tumbling and stunting are both very difficult to master and require a lot of strength, and cheerleaders have to make it look easy while also incorporating jumps and dancing/motions. Also, even if high school cheer isn’t always considered a full-on “sport” because we don’t compete, it’s still frustrating when people disregard all of our hard work because of that very fact. We put in as much practice time and work into our routines as any other sports team would for their games. My team may not be out on a competition mat, but we’re still working on jumps and stunting while perfecting dances and halftime routines (admittedly, we don’t do much tumbling at all).
My cheer team has actually had practices all summer, so I believe we do work extremely hard. Our coaches have been conditioning us a lot and we usually run a mile as our warmup every practice. We’ve been putting in even more work than usual the last week (personally, I hadn’t been at practices since the middle of June because my family trip conflicted with some and then we had a break from cheer in July for a while) since we are gearing up for camp. When this post goes up, I will be in the middle of our first day at camp; we go to a four-day cheer camp each summer to bond and gain more skills as a team. The camp is hosted by USA (United Spirit Association) and this year the location we are attending camp at is the Knott’s Berry Farm resort hotel.
I will be posting soon about my experiences at camp- it’s definitely a crazy busy time and a lot of hard work, but I’ll get the posts up as soon as I can! I also already posted an article about how I packed for camp and my essentials for any sports camp in general, so check that out if you haven’t already. I hope you guys enjoyed this little insight on what it’s like to be a high school cheerleader- let me know if you want more cheer related content and be on the lookout for those camp posts! I’ll be back soon, wish me luck for the rest of camp 🙂
-Brooke
adventures of a typical high school student 