Is Cheerleading a Sport

WE GOT SPIRIT, YES WE DO!! WE GOT SPIRIT, HOW BOUT YOU?!?!?!? Short skirts, loud voices, and tons of energy; that’s what most high school students define as a typical cheerleader. Most of the teenagers in the wolrld will have this opinion. Along with being the blondes of the school, cheerleaders are also seen as wanna-be athletes. I mean, all they do is just cheer on other teams, right? They don’t actually do anything other than a few back-flips here or there. How hard could it be? The answer is a lot harder than one would think. Although cheerleading is formally deemed not a sport, it is actually one of the most demanding sports out there. If you look up the definition of a sport in the dictionary, it will tell you that a sport is a “physical activity that is governed by a set of rules or customs and often engaged in competitively”. But what it doesn’t include is the trust, the teamwork, necessary for any sport. Cheerleading isn’t considered a sport because by definition our main objective is to cheer on other teams in their own sports. But there is not a cheerleader out there that agrees with that. True, that is their main job. But there is just so much more to what they do than just providing school spirit. There is a sense of teamwork and family that really isn’t there as much in any other sport you will find. A cheerleader isn’t just a member of a team- they are a member of your family, someone you really have to depend on. They literally put their lives in the hands of their teammates everyday, just to get even a fraction better at what they do. There is a trust there that is not easily broken, as with a dedication to your team. And with that dedication comes practice. Lots and lots of practice. The average cheerleader practices about ten hours a week, based off of the the practice schedules taken from three local high school teams; Loveland High, Thompson Valley, and Mountain View. Some teams, however, like the Thompson Valley cheerleaders, practice