How the Cheer Team Balances School and Sports

How could cheer affect or interfere with your performance at school? Does it make your performance better, or do you get behind on work, or does it stay the same? There are so many aspects that go into doing a sport or after school activity, such as having to keep up with homework, schoolwork, and keeping your grades up. At the same time, you have to do all your practices, games, and make sure you perform well and don’t mess up. More reasons why cheerleading is a good idea is because you get to stay active and healthy, but sometimes everything can be too much with school. All of this can be stressful sometimes, but worth it because you get to do what you’re passionate about and do the sports and other activities you’d like. 

Do the cheerleaders also agree with this, or is it too much sometimes to have to keep up with school and a sport? Freshman Harper Winget-Wilson said, “Cheer is a big commitment, and you have to make sure you will have enough time for cheer and school, and if you don’t, you probably shouldn’t do cheer because it takes up a lot of your time and practice is long. So if you wanna do cheer, you have to really consider your grades, homework, and if you can get everything done on top of doing cheer.” Afina Segler added onto this, “It really depends on the person; some people have a harder time with school, so they have a harder time keeping up with school and cheer, that’s why a lot of girls had to drop out of cheer because cheer takes up too much of their time,” said Winget-Wilson. Afina also said, “I am pretty good at managing my time, so I can balance school and cheer pretty well, and I’m gonna cheer next year too, and I might also do stunt cheer too.” Cheer can be pretty difficult sometimes when it comes to keeping up with school, but some people can just manage their time really well, so keeping up with school is really easy for them. 

From a different perspective, Haley, who was having a hard time keeping up in school, now has no problem with it and is a flyer. Haley said, “Cheer is really fun and hard to keep up with at first because of the long practices and all the games, but slowly you get the hang of balancing school work with cheer, and it is really easy once you get used to it. Adding onto this, Haley said, “When you are first going through the transition from middle school into high school, it might be more difficult because of the work, but I got used to it and can now balance them both. Balancing cheer and homework might be hard at first because the school work may be difficult and cheer takes up a lot of your time, but the more you get used to it, the simpler it becomes to balance.