The Sport That Helped 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.

Something that I enjoy doing often is cheerleading. It is something that I have done since I was in fifth grade and it is the only sport that I have been passionate about for a long time. I have tried doing other sports but none ever had the same affect on myself that cheer did.

I was apart of the cheerleading club here at Plymouth since my freshman year, along with being apart of the board of officers for two of the three years. I am now a senior and I just thought that it was time to end the journey of my favorite pastime activity.

While I am here at school I needed to make extra money for food shopping and doing activities with my roommates and friends, having it be my senior year makes more responsibility for me, becoming and adult very soon and I just thought it was right that I focus on my school work now.