High school cheerleading is often perceived as carefree and effortless, but the reality is far more demanding. Behind the chants and pom-poms lies rigorous training and intense dedication, which often surprises those who underestimate the strength, agility, and teamwork necessary to succeed in varsity cheerleading.
At Woodgrove, out of the 24 students on the varsity team, 20 are on the school’s competition team, which competes with other schools in invitational, district, regional, and state competitions in addition to doing the regular sideline cheering at football games. Practice for the team is six days a week for two to three hours, alternating between afternoon practices and morning practices every other day. Morning practices start at 6:30 a.m. on weekdays and 7 a.m. on Saturdays. Explaining what an everyday practice looks like, Varsity Coach Melanie Badillo said, “In the beginning they warm up. They run 10 laps in the gym, or they do bear crawls while saying the words to our competition cheer. Then we warm up stunts that we’re doing, whether they’re for games or for the routine when we compete…After that, we will go over cheers for games on Friday nights and specific stunts because the stunt groups are different [from] what they are for the [competition] routine.” When the team is nearing a competition, they often practice “Full Outs,” which are complete run-throughs of the routine including every element. Senior and captain Aubrey Coates remarked, “It’s exhausting. It’s only three minutes long, but you’re doing so much in those three minutes. You’re screaming at the top of your lungs, you’re tumbling, you’re doing all of your stunts. It’s exhausting. There’s no breaks in it.”
Many of the girls commit a huge amount of time into this sport, especially since many also compete for other All-Star competition teams. “I do it outside of school also, so I’m doing around 21 hours a week. It’s pretty heavy,” discussed Elaina Cucchi, a junior on the team. Similarly, sophomore cheerleader Vanessa Jackson, who also competes in an outside competition team, said she spends around 18 hours a week cheerleading.
Naturally, such demanding and time-consuming work can take a toll on the body. “These kids take a beating,” stated Badillo. “It’s kind of funny when people try out and they’re like, ‘I could do that,’ and then once they get into practice it’s like, ‘Oh my God, I’m fully beaten up.’ These are top notch athletes.”
Many of the cheerleaders stress that people do not believe in the difficulty until they see it up close. Badillo shared, “There was a TikTok trend that was called ‘bring a boy to practice.’…The amount of respect we had after that was huge. I mean, it’s not natural to hold another human being in the air.” Freshman Syler Blaszek commented, “I think everyone thinks it’s an easy sport to do and we don’t do a lot, but behind the scenes most people don’t see what happens. It’s a lot more than you would think.”
You can support these hard-working athletes by showing up for their mini-districts on October 17 at Loudoun County High School, the district tournament on October 22 at Park View High School, and the regional tournament at Tuscarora High School on October 30.