The Truth About Cheering Many people stereotype cheerleaders as the pretty, popular airheads who stand on the sideline to look good, but that is farther from the truth than you could ever imagine. Cheering at football games may seem very easy, but it takes a lot to memorize over a dozen cheers with hand motion and footwork. Being a sideline cheerleader isn’t the only kind of cheering that there is. There’s also competition cheering. Competition cheering includes dance, tumbling (gymnastics), jumps, stunting, and of course the cheer part. Competition cheering takes place in the winter when basketball would. If you play basketball, you obviously enough have to be in shape. In cheering it’s the same kind of idea. Cheerleaders for a competition team aren’t running up and down a court for four quarters, but they do have a fast, strenuous, and exhausting routine that they have to perform in two minutes or under. In the routine you have to have three jumps, a tumbling sequence, five stunts or tosses, a dance, and a cheer. Can you imagine doing all that in two minutes? People may think that cheerleaders can’t score points, so therefore, it’s not a sport, but that’s not true. In cheerleading competitions, you are scored on your routine and how well you do. It’s like gymnastics, gymnasts are judged on their different events. At a competition when you do something good, you get points and if you do something bad, you lose points. Even though your not shooting a ball into a net, you can still score. I think the reason people think all this because their uneducated. Even some cheering parents don’t quite understand how it all works. I believe that until you’ve been behind the scenes and seen the hard work, the dedication, and the sacrifice than you don’t truly know. Cheerleaders would give up anything to practice their routine more times. Getting a routine perfect is