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.