How Cheerleading taught me resilience

By Sydney Sohn Grade 10 student

Bothmentally and physically, Cheerleading was able to teach me resilience. Many may think of Cheerleading as a sport that just requires a group of people to smile and verbally cheer at basketball games. However, it is really much more than that. Cheerleaders go through several mental and physical challenges that people do not know about.

Especially when the KAIAC competition is around the corner, Cheerleaders go through a handful of challenges. No matter how big or small the challenge was, my teammates and I learned and developed resilience. With having to learn new and difficult stunts, several members get injured. Flyers fall from high above the ground, the Bases and Backspots get stepped, fallen on, and much more. But we all need each other. The Flyer can’t do the stunt while missing a Base, and a Base/Backspot can’t carry a flyer alone. With Cheerleading being a sport that requires constant physical teamwork, no matter how big/small an injury can be, a strong level of determination is found between the athletes to help themselves and each other recover fast. The team would fall apart with just one member missing. We quickly learned to push through the pain.

In Cheerleading, there is something called “marking”, where the athletes just mark their places in the routine instead of actually performing all of the stunts, jumps, and tumbling. Normally, we would mark our routine if someone is absent that day, or someone is sitting out due to an injury. This year, (not only due to absences or injuries), we spent a lot of time working on individual stunts without trying to put the entire routine together. We practiced section by section but didn’t run through the entire routine including all jumps and stunts as often. A couple of days before our KAIAC competition, we tried putting everything together, and it was quite the experience. Certain parts of the routine didn’t look as clean as we wanted it to, people lost energy halfway through the routine as we never tried everything together before, and even major parts of the routine, such as the pyramid, were risky. We were faced with many challenges both physically and mentally, due to a time crunch. I remember the day right before KAIAC. We had around 2 hours of practice after school, and we just couldn’t get it. We couldn’t get passed the entire routine smoothly. Not even once. I could tell that we all started to worry about whether we could pull this routine off the next day or not. It was our last practice before KAIAC, and we didn’t have a single successful full out of the routine. However, this is when I really came to a realization that pouring discouraging thoughts or energy can really impact the team's results. I was able to quickly snap out of the discouraged and worried feeling, and just gave it 110%. I could tell that everyone was giving their all into this last practice, and that also motivated me to work even harder. Having resilience does pay off. At the KAIAC competition, we got 10-15 minutes to practice on the big mat. Our team couldn’t do a smooth full out, and we still stumbled here and there with many unstable parts in the routine. However, we all encouraged each other, snapped out of the negative thoughts, and really gave it our all in our last chance. Funny and surprisingly enough, the one successful full-out we did, was the actual competition performance. All of us being able to overcome our difficult physical and mental challenges paid off in the end with a successful KAIAC competition performance.

Hence, during this season, Cheerleading was able to teach me resilience in both mental and physical ways. The experiences and lessons learned throughout this season not only helped bring a successful competition performance but also taught me the importance of having resilience in everyday activities. Sitting and worrying is much worse than thinking of ways and strategies to quickly recover and withstand any forms of difficulties that come along the way.