The Sport That Helped Me

If you know me, you know how shy I can get when someone new is around me. As a cheerleader you need to be confident and open to things that you might not be comfortable with.

Every cheerleader knows that when you are doing anything in a routine you have to make facials so you can sell your performance to the judges, that is the most important thing. You can have the worst routine in the whole competition, but if it looks like you are having the time of your life, it makes the routine so much better.

Ever since I was growing up, I have had the worst social anxiety, but when you are on the mat for a competition, you can’t be scared. You have to be confident as ever, not afraid to mess up and if you do, keep going and do not look back. This has probably been the best life advice I could have gotten as a kid.

A famous quote from every coach I have ever had is:

“If you feel weird while you are doing it, that means you are doing it right”

Having that as an inspiration as me never being alone making the weirdest faces on the mat makes it so much easier to be comfortable with what I am doing. Making my weird faces in front of hundreds, and maybe thousands, of people I do not know at all helps me to get out of my comfort zone around just about anybody.

I’m not the person I was when I first started cheering, but of course I’m not because I was only nine years old. But I always wonder if I would be even more shy than I am today if I never had the confidence that cheerleading gave me.

When you join a sport, an after school activity, or anything that has to do with meeting up with a group of people, there is a bond that is made that is like no other friendship. Practice was where I met some of my life long friends, and I am forever grateful for them.

Joining the cheer team at Plymouth introduced me to very many of my now best friends, who I even live with now.

The first day of practice my freshman year, I knew nobody on the team. I only knew the officers of the club and saw some familiar faces, but knew no names. I am terrible at starting conversations so I was patiently waiting and hoping that someone would come up to me first.

My coach starts off practice with,

“Everyone grab a parter, we are going to be doing partner workouts for the first day of tryouts”

The only thing that I can remember thinking to myself is how nervous I was to have to go find someone to be my partner. Then this girl walks up to me,

“Hey! My name is Cheri, want to be partners?”

Ever since that first practice, Cheri and I have been inseparable. We lived together our sophomore year, and now again our senior year. I am so thankful that cheering has lead me to unbreakable bonds with so many different people. The flyer that I had my first year doing cheer in fifth grade is still one of my best friends to this day. I always wonder what would have happened if I never joined the team, and if I would have ever met any of these people some other way.

The hardest thing a person has to do is walk away from something they love, or enjoy doing. For me, that was cheer. It was always a way out of my head and escaping the hot mess of what sometimes is my life.

Leaving the sport that made me who I am was something I never wanted to do, I was only going to be ready for when it was time that I was out of school, and there were no teams for me to join because of my age. This is something that I think about everyday, something that I regret doing and a decision I wish I never had to make.

At the end of Spring Semester 2019, I realized I needed to make a tough decision. And that was realizing I needed to take a step back from my cheer team. When you are in a club sport, you have dues that you need to pay every year, even if you are returning from the previous year.

The yearly fee for the club was always manageable, being a college student you do not have much money to begin with, but I was always able to figure out a payment plan. In the past, we have stayed very low with how much everything was since we were always going to local competitions and didn’t have to pay too much for the fees. This year, the club decided to almost double the prices because we want to go to a competition that is all the way in Myrtle Beach, so our dues would be our plane ticket.

I had a long talk with my coach the last day of practices of the semester, we tried to figure out a payment plan but we finally came to the sad reality that it was not going to happen. We do fundraisers throughout our season to help dues be bearable for everyone and to get the prices down, but that can be hard if you do fundraisers that might not appeal to many people.

This isn’t the attempt of a sob story but the sad reality that sometimes life doesn’t happen the way you would like it to. I wish things were different and maybe they can be, I have two jobs at school and maybe if I save up enough money I will be able to rejoin the team.