About 85 percent of the population would say that cheerleading is not a sport. Well today, I am a part of the 15 percent to prove to you why it is. Being a cheerleader for 5 years now has given me quite a bit of insight on this particular topic.

Currently, I am a freshman and I have the wonderful experience of cheerleading in college. The transition from high school to college is large enough without the sore muscles crying every night after a hard conditioning practice that day. Not only do we practice every day of the week for three to four hours, we condition on top of that. At some points in time, you would think we were the track team with the amount of running that we do. On top of conditioning, our sport includes holding people who weigh as much as 140 pounds in the air above your head for long periods of time without dropping them. Also, we run as fast as we can towards nothing and flip our body through the air. The amount of muscle and strength it takes to accomplish a task like that is impeccable.

Not only do we cheer at football and basketball games, but we compete. We put in work for eight months to perform a two-minute routine on a mat with judges scoring your every move. Step off the mat? Deduction. Wobble during a stunt? Deduction. Every judge focuses on one specific thing and nitpicks at all your flaws. No matter how many months you worked, if one thing goes wrong you could lose your chance at winning nationals. Therefore, the eight months that you have been working consist of learning, finalizing, and perfecting new tricks and stunts.

The beginning of the journey to nationals begins in August where we start to blend as a team and discover our difficulty level while working on our fitness. We do these things by practicing, going to open gym, tumbling classes, and the weight room multiple times a week. We are at the top level of fitness out of the teams on campus. Granted, the other teams work just as hard at their sports and games as we do. However, cheerleading is extremely underestimated on the amount of condition and practicing we do.

So why do people think it's not a sport? One reason I heard was because we wear bows. Softball wears bows, and people consider them a sport. Another reason I heard was because cheer does not have a ball or puck, etc. Swimming, wrestling, running, they do not have a ball or a puck and they are all a sport. We just throw our teammates instead of a ball.

Just because cheerleading doesn't have the stereotypical look of any other sport does not mean that it isn't included in that category. So the next time you belittle us, remember that we work just as hard as every other sport.