adventures of a typical high school student

Welcome back guys!

Today I’m going to be answering a bunch of questions people often ask me about high school cheer. Lots of my friends at school play the more “common” sports and find the performance sports like cheer and dance intriguing, so I get asked a lot of questions. It’s also a completely different experience being a cheerleader in comparison to playing another sport since even though I’m still on a school team, it’s obviously a very spirited activity getting to cheer on our other sports teams.

Let’s quickly preface this with a little background about the logistics of my specific high school’s cheer team: my school has both a spirit cheer team and a competitive STUNT team, which has only been added about 3 or 4 years ago. I am only on the spirit cheer team- I chose not to participate in STUNT (the STUNT season goes from December through the end of the school year in case you were curious). The spirit cheer team used to attend some competitions a long time ago (back in the early 2000s) but now does not compete. We perform at football and basketball games only, but we practice in the late spring and throughout the summer, so our season goes from May through February when basketball season ends.

Our school also divides the cheer teams in a funky way; they are divided by grade level, not skill. The freshmen team is all freshmen, the JV team is all sophomores and varsity is all juniors and seniors. You either make the team for your grade level or you don’t make it into the program at all. Therefore, I was on the freshmen team last year and I am now on JV. I am not sure if I will continue doing cheer in junior or senior year/at the varsity level because it is a big time commitment (I may drop it in so I have the time to get a job) and I don’t plan on trying to cheer in college or anything of that sort; however, I am trying to make the most of this season since it may be my last!

For one last piece of background on my personal cheer experience, I was also on a half-year competition cheer team for beginners at my local cheer gym in eighth grade- I was interested in doing high school cheer and I wanted to gain some experience before trying out. I absolutely LOVED my comp team and we had so much fun; we ended up getting a bid to a competition Las Vegas and our trip there was amazing. Competitive cheer is definitely an intense sport, but it’s so unique and wonderful that it makes up for all the pressure. My half-year on that team was enough of a boost in skills for me to make school cheer team, so I said goodbye to my short-lived time as a competitive cheerleader and moved on to high school!

Now we can move onto the questions!

• So, cheer’s not really a sport, is it? Everyone has their own opinions on this, but I believe that cheer IS a sport, and an extremely difficult one at that. My specific high school cheer team is listed under the “Activities” section and not “Athletics”, but we still get athletic credit for it- it’s the same for dance. This seems fair to me since we don’t compete so we don’t really get the title of being a sport, but we still put in as much time and effort as other sports teams so we can get our P.E. credit. Some high school teams are AMAZING and go to competitions all over the country, so it just depends. I think all-star competitive cheer is obviously a sport with no explanation needed, but some people still disagree with that.
• What’s your opinion on cheer vs. dance vs. gymnastics? I’ve done dance and gymnastics briefly when I was young, and they are both so different from cheer. People should really stop comparing them because even if they all share certain elements, it doesn’t mean one is harder or better than the others. Even the way you perform in each of them is different (facials, etc.). I appreciate all three and often watch dance and gymnastics videos on my Instagram explore page. There’s so much we can learn from each other’s sports. The dance team at my school is overall much more well-liked than cheer, but it’s because they are competitive and have won national championships many times; they’re amazing!
• If you’re a cheerleader, are you popular/do you think you’re popular? Are all the other girls on the team popular? This is a major stereotype!! I do not think I am popular, I’m not popular, and I don’t think being a cheerleader has anything to do with popularity. I have a medium size group of friends, and only one of my other friends is on the cheer team with me. People actually make fun of the cheer team at my school for not being a real sport and such- we don’t have the best reputation. As for the other girls, quite a few of them actually are on the more popular side. However, this has nothing to do with them being cheerleaders; lots of their friends/other people in the popular groups are in completely different sports.
• Is cheer difficult or can anyone do it? Cheer is VERY difficult once you start progressing into harder stunts, tumbling, etc. That being said, I feel like anyone can START off with the basics of cheer if they’re willing to learn. Doing a prep or a cartwheel or learning a dance are skills you might have tried out with friends when you were younger; you probably still can today. However, trying to execute more difficult skills with good technique and constantly practicing full routines would be challenging for someone who’s not used to the pace or material- just like any other sport.
• Are you friends with all the football players/have you dated a football player? I am only friendly with one of the football players, and it’s unrelated to the cheer/football bond- we had a class together second semester and talked during that. Other than that, I just haven’t ever really connected with any of them, so no, I haven’t dated one either. A lot of the girls on my team are friendly with some of the football players, but mainly the ones they were already friends with before high school/outside of cheer.
• Can you do a “backflip”? I put in this one as a joke, but it’s something people ask a lot. I take tumbling classes two to three times a week at the local cheer gym I used to compete with, and I’m trying to get my back handspring. I have it on the trampoline/softer surfaces, but I just don’t have the confidence to try and throw it on the floor without someone spotting me. Short answer: No, but close!
• What’s your favorite part of being a cheerleader? Probably just the physical elements of cheer and the fact that I get to be part of such an amazing, unique sport. Stunts and tumbling are just so mezmerizing, and even though I can’t necessarily do the most difficult ones, it’s still cool to know that I’m part of this sport/world. I watch cheer videos online constantly, I follow famous competitive teams, and I’ve researched lots about the sport in general. I’m not the most talented at it or anything like that; however, I think it’s one of the coolest sports in the world. Cheering at games is also really cool since you get a closer view at the action, but it does get tiring in the heat.
• Why/how did you know you wanted to try cheer? Honestly, I did it on a whim. I tried every typical sport when I was younger but never particularly liked any or stuck to them, so once I was in middle school I just gave up. I had an older friend that was in high school and tried out for cheer because she didn’t play any other sport and didn’t want to do P.E.; she made it, said it was fun, and suggested I do the same thing. My favorite sports that I had tried were gymnastics and dance (I hadn’t been good, but I liked them) so I figured it was similar yet different enough that I should still give it a shot. I was in eighth grade at the time and one of my friends also expressed interest in doing cheer in high school since she didn’t play any other sport either- we told our moms we wanted to try it, and they found the local gym/beginner comp team.
• What’s the atmosphere at practice like? Is it chill since you don’t compete? If you had asked me this last year, you would’ve gotten a totally different answer. We had a very inexperienced coach last year for frosh and varsity (the old one quit and left the school scrambling to find someone) and she was extremely laid-back; she wanted us to be good, but she didn’t teach us anything and she didn’t really do anything if we didn’t meet her expectations besides lecture us and give us weird pep talks. She was very quirky in general… regardless, we only had practice 2 times a week for an hour and a half, and there were no rules about what we could wear to practice, hair and jewelry, etc. At the end of the season, she got fired and they brought the old coach back (she’s a teacher at the school so she wasn’t hard to reach) to be the head coach and varsity coach. They brought a coach from the local cheer gym I’ve been mentioning to coach freshman, and the JV coach remained the same as last year (she’s super sweet and has remained calm as long as I’ve known her). I am sooo glad we still have the same coach for JV, but the other coaches are TOUGH. We mainly practice as a group this year, and the conditioning is intense, their expectations are high, and they yell at us a lot. I would go into more detail but I don’t want to bad mouth them or seem too negative. Basically, it’s a harsher environment than you’d expect.
• Do you practice a lot? I mentioned above how much we practiced last year- 2 days a week for one and a half hours and then we’d get there an hour early before games to run our routines. Last year, we also practiced 3-5 days a week in the summer for 2 hours and we attended a four day cheer camp at UCSB. This year, we are going to practice 3 days a week for two hours and we still arrive an hour early for games. This summer we’ve practiced 3-4 times a week for 2 to 2 and a half hours, but we’ve also had a lot of other events/clinics, etc. We attended another four day cheer camp, but it was the “elite” version of the camp we attended last year, and it was held at Knott’s Berry Farm. Overall during a school week we have cheer 4 days a week, just one of those days is game day. It changes for basketball season because we usually have two games a week and less routines to practice.

I hope you guys enjoyed learning more about my experience as a high school cheerleader and got some possible questions answered! Let me know if you guys have any more questions or would like to know anything else about high school cheer or cheer in general. If this ends up being my last year participating in a high school sport/high school cheer/cheer in general, I want to make the most of it and talk about it as much as I can. Lots of exciting content is coming soon, so stay tuned!

-Brooke