It's not as easy as it looks

If anyone can convince you that cheerleading is in fact a sport it is me. Ever since I was 10 years old I have been a cheerleader. Cheerleading has always been my safe place. The only time I forget my worries is when I am stunting, tumbling, even cheering at a game. I have been taught so much throughout my cheer years and I still am learning in college cheer. First lesson it has taught me is discipline:  when you mess something up it affects the whole entire team. Next, Teamwork: You must work together with every person on your team. In order to win everyone has to put in equal effort. Another thing I have learned is trust: a cheerleader must trust their whole stunt group to hit every stunt. Time management is a big one. Cheer takes up a lot of your time and you have to learn how to balance school, cheer, and a social life. I have also learned that in order to win you need hard work and dedication. I have persevered through it all. I am positive that every sport out there has taught a player these exact things just like cheerleading has done to me, so it should be a sport. To some people it may look easy but what we do is actually really hard. If you think throwing a 115-pound girl in the air is easy, you are crazy.  And tumbling, well if gymnastics is a sport they tumble as well so why isn’t cheerleading one? And dance, well we dance our asses off, and it’s the last thing in our routine so we are already tired enough and have to keep pushing through till the very end. According to an online article posted November 2nd, recently a study led by researcher Hermann Engels of Wayne State University determined that competitive cheerleaders are in the same league physically as Olympic gymnasts and soccer contenders They ran a bunch of tests on 33 different cheerleaders and found that they ranked high in their strength and fitness. It showed that they ranked as good as top-level athletes. Even though this study was done on high school cheerleaders, college cheerleading is even more intense so the rankings would be even higher for the college level. Why is it not that even though it takes as much energy out of you as most other sports do that its not even considered a sport itself? Cheerleading is getting more dangerous year by year, with new skills being developed all the time. If it would be made an official sport there would be more safety rules, lowering the amount of people who get injured from cheer. I could honestly go on and on about why I want everyone to think cheerleading is a sport. It is something I am very passionate about and I have learned so much from cheering all these years. I hope that after this one will have a better understanding to why cheerleading should be considered a sport.  Watch this video down below of the University of Louisville coed cheerleading team from college nationals this past year, you can tell that our routines take a lot of effort and are extremely difficult to preform.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JX6Dmcarzpk

Article Link:

http://www.mpnnow.com/article/20131102/SPORTS/131109991/10382/SPORTS