Cheerleading in Galway

Practice, dedication, passion and hard work. These are all similarities shared between athletes everywhere, but here in Galway the feelings of admiration towards a player’s sport seems to amplified. Whether it’s the fall, winter or spring season, you can always tell if there’s a game later in the day from all the blue and gold or from listening to students and teachers alike predicting the outcome or talking about the players stats. Recently, Galway and New York State decided to finally recognize another demanding physically activity as an official sport; cheerleading.

Most people would argue that cheerleading cannot be considered a real sport because it’s not rigorous or challenging. They’re just girls and guys that like to jump around and scream at games.  But if you really think about it, cheerleading is not that different from other “real” sports. Would you say that soccer is less of a sport when compared to volleyball because you can’t use your hands? Or that wrestling isn’t as intense as track because it’s not centered around running? When trying to classify activities as sports or not, you have to look at each one individually, not in comparison. In senior Jenny Metzger’s view, “I’m completely thrilled that cheerleading is now considered a sport because we’ve been under-appreciated for the longest time. Just because we wear skirts doesn’t mean we’re any less compared to other athletes. We’re now considered equals… And I’m happy I was around to witness everything fall into place.”

Because cheerleading is now a sport, there are different rules and regulations we have to abide by. The change that everyone is most excited for is that to be eligible to compete to win WAC sectionals, we have to participate in at least two, non- league competitions. For a cheer competition, normally teams hire a professional choreographer to make a two minute and thirty second long routine comprised of a unique cheer, stunt sequence and dance. But we create everything ourselves, and past competitions have shown that we are pretty good at it too! In 2011 Varsity won grand champions and third place in 2012 at Broadalbin-Perth. This year we are going to three different competitions: January 31st, February 28th and March 8th

Although competitions are a huge part of our season, they’re not everything. JV and Varsity practice together Monday through Friday, and Saturdays the team gets extra practice to perfect routines. We perform these at both girls’ and boys’ basketball games during the week and to further show our support, we cheer on the wrestlers. Last year was the first time the cheerleaders were permitted to travel to other schools to cheer on the boys’ team. That continues this year when we visit Saratoga Catholic and Mayfield.

With just over a month left of the season, everyone tries to make each practice memorable. Like any other team we’ve had our good days and our bad, but that’s what keeps us close. Senior Emilia Herlitz from Sweden expresses the differences she experienced so far being on the cheer team. “Cheer is completely different from anything I have ever done before. We don’t have school sports so I used to swim for a club. I swam relays every now and then but I mainly competed for myself, so being a part of a team is new to me. I used to think that I would hate being on a team but I love it. Everyone is working towards a mutual goal and it really brings you close to each other.”  As our coach always tells us to remember, “We Are One”.