San Diego, CA – December 19, 2025
On Friday nights, sideline cheerleaders are seen cheering, performing dances and supporting their football team. What many people do not see is the amount of time and effort cheerleading takes behind long practices. For varsity and jv cheerleaders, the season lasts from August all the way up until February and includes long practices, difficult stunts and the hard work of keeping up with school work.
A varsity cheerleader at San Diego High, Karely Perez, said cheerleading takes up a large part of her time. “I feel like cheerleading is very time consuming and it takes up a lot of your free time,” she said. “Especially as kids and high schoolers, we want to have a lot of free time and you get very overwhelmed with your schoolwork and you have to make sure that you have really good time management, and I feel like that’s really hard.” She also mentioned that practices and games make your daily schedule even busier for the start of the school year. “At the beginning we had like three practices every week and we had our football games on Fridays, so we did not have any breaks except for Monday,” she explained.
Many people think sideline cheer is easy because it looks like dancing, Perez said, but the physical work tells otherwise. “Its not easy,” she said. “The stunting part of it and keeping up with school, it’s more than that.” Stunting is one of the most required parts of cheerleading. Perez said one routine at cheer camp required extra strength and team work. “We had a routine that was our final routine,” she said. “That required a lot of strength and teamwork, we were very exhausted but we still had to put in a lot of strength.”
Another varsity cheerleader at San Diego High, Atziry Hernandez, agreed that stunting takes the most effort. “The stunting part because you need a lot of strength and you need to know what you’re doing,” she said. “It just takes practice to get down, it depends if everyone knows what they’re doing because it’s a group effort.” She also mentioned to say that pep rally routines are especially challenging. “We need to keep dancing and stunting for like two whole minutes, we need to show what we can do,” Hernandez said.
Balancing cheerleading with school can be difficult. Perez said staying on top of work requires strict time management. “I get home and I do my work when I have the time, so that it doesn’t cut me off from doing cheer,” she said. But, she also mentioned that cheer motivates her to keep up with her grades. “I do keep that in the back of my head,” Perez said. “Because I can’t end up on the lost of privilege list or I would get benched or kicked out.”
Hernandez said cheer pushed her academically. “In cheer you need to keep above a 2.0 in your GPA,” she said. “If I want to stay on the cheer team I need to do my school work.” Coach Gianni Petties-Wilson said grades are closely looked over. “We do grade checks whenever necessary to make sure that the cheerleaders have at least a 2.0 GPA,” Petties-Wilson stated. She also said cheerleading teaches responsibility, “There’s a lot of times where they step up and help other people that may need help that the captains don’t notice.”
Perez said cheerleading is still not recognized as a sport. “It’s always like an activity, people say we just jump around,” she said. For those who doubt cheerleading Petties-Wilson had a simple response. “I would have them come to a practice and see if they could keep up with the girls,” she said.
Even though cheerleading is physically demanding and time-consuming, the cheerleaders continue because it teaches them discipline, teamwork, and responsibility that help them succeed both on the sideline and during school.
