Feather staffers practice with cheer squad

Touchdown! Home Run! Dunk! Goal! Football, baseball, basketball and soccer. Probably the top four known sports played in the U.S. What is a sport? These four that were just listed would easily be considered a sport.

According to dictionary.com, a sport is, “an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment.”

This brings up the question that has sparked many arguments over it. Is cheer a sport? Well CIF (California Interscholastic Association) has declared cheer a sport. So there should be no argument against that, but a bigger question that is asked is; are cheerleaders considered athletes?

If you say cheerleading isn’t something that involves physical exertion and skill against an opponent, well I’d say try it for yourself. Cheerleading does take skill and being in physical shape. Knowing how to do jump routines and cheers takes a lot of work and a lot of time. That is just a glimpse at what an elite cheer squad does.

I have played sports for over nine years of my life playing all different kinds of sports and I’ve learned to be an athlete you have to have skill, hard work, focus and determination. According to dictionary.com, the official definition of an athlete is, “a person who is proficient in sports and other forms of physical exercise.”

I personally learned that cheerleaders could easily be considered athletes. Over the past few days, video journalist Kyle Friesen, ’19, and I practiced with the FCS high school cheerleading squad. We practiced jump, dance and cheer routines alongside veteran cheerleaders while experiencing the agenda also. We practiced 45 minutes a day for two days while the third was for two and a half hours.

Now that cheerleading is a sport, cheerleaders have an official competitive season. Their season is a winter high school sport season. That season includes sports like soccer and basketball. Squads compete in division, district, State and all the way up to nationals.

Carlee Whipple, ‘18, is a senior cheerleader on the FCS cheer team. She is committed to her sport and passionate for her teammates. She shares her struggles and successes of her high school career in cheer.

“I think that you can become an athlete if you really try your best to become a cheerleader,” Whipple said. “You don’t have to start out as an athlete to try cheerleading you just have to be willing to give it your all for this sport. I also think that sometimes people don’t understand that cheerleading isn’t a sport because they don’t do it. Sometimes cheerleading doesn’t look like a sport but it takes a lot of effort, stamina, and control to play this sport.

“It takes a lot of dedication to be a cheerleader. You have to memorize every single cheer you have to memorize every single dance,” Whipple continued. “You can’t mess up. This year I’m a base and I’ve actually gotten physically stronger. Emotionally, I’ve learned that if you drop a stunt all I have to do is just get back up and put my frustration into that stunt.

“Cheerleaders put in a lot of effort into this sport,” Whipple said, “and when people say that it isn’t a sport it gets us angry because they don’t actually do the sport and they can’t really judge a sport based on if they don’t do it. I love cheerleading because I get to stunt with all of my cheerleaders and hang out and we grow as a sisterhood instead of just a team.”

Whipple mentioned that the FCS squad will be trying to compete in nationals this year and that takes a lot of time and practice. Every team has a coach but it takes a very special and dedicated one to make a team national champions.

Coach Hope Villines is the FCS high school and junior high cheer coach. She has been the campus cheer coach for five years and also has two children that attend FCS; Tyler and Hannah Villines. She explained the dedication it takes and the sacrifices that have been made, to be a cheerleader.

“I absolutely think that cheerleaders are athletes,” Villines said. “I doubt that anyone who watches the sport of cheer cannot doubt that they are athletes. The strength that it takes, the tenacity that it takes, the dedication that it takes, and we like to say that football players through a small ball, basketball players through this round ball but we through humans in the air and we cannot drop them.

“This sport is year round,” Villines continued. “We start practices in June, and don’t stop till the very end of basketball season. They get a few weeks off and then it is time for tryouts all over again. This year we have upped our game, new choreographer, new routine, and we are competing in a higher division. It’s going to be a challenging season but an exciting one.”

Katie Mendenhall is the Buchanan competition cheer coach. She has coached cheer for over 17 years and has much experience in the sport. She shares what competition cheerleaders life is like and the commitment they have to make.

“The official cheer season is from September to February,” Mendenhall said. “Our girls though, because of the level that they compete with, is year round. We do tryouts in May and do workout practices over the summer. Our cheerleaders make a lot of sacrifices, they can’t always go to school events, they’re making huge time commitments to practices and they cant always do the other sports they want to do.”

While football season is over, be sure to catch the cheer team in action at home basketball games and at their next competition next semester. The Feather Online will post information as it becomes available on its social media channels and on the website.

For more information on the cheer team, read: Profile: Carlee Whipple leads cheer team with passion, experience. For more articles, read: Pearl Harbor survivors recall stories of attack. and Fresno native Villyan Bijev thrives in USL.

Slideshow images of ‘Journalists Join Cheer’. 

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