It was the last few days of summer before my first semester at Michigan. I, like many college students do, had procrastinated packing my extensive and unnecessary wardrobe until just a few days before move in. I carefully combed through the remains of my almost-empty closet, reaching the top left pole of miscellaneous hanging clothes. The light hit the green glitters almost majestically, instantly catching my attention. And there it was, stuffed in the back of my closet, the last AllStar cheer uniform I had ever competed in. The white cropped long sleeve with sheer, green sequined sleeves. The white mini skirt folded crisply, revealing the blue bottom trim. Of course I had kept it. I mean, how could I not?

​

Toddler Lauren was incredibly ambitious. By that, I mean she took tennis lessons, played soccer, did ballet, tried some basketball, and did gymnastics too. Honestly, I don’t know how my mom kept track of me. Through all of these miscellaneous activities, nothing stood out to me. That is, until I started cheer. My friends' parents and mine had put us all in a gymnastics class at 5 Star Sports Academy, a mid-sized gym just a few minutes from our house. One of the last days, we stayed at our class extra late. I saw the 5 Star cheerleaders warming up and beginning their practice, turned to my mom and said “I want to do that.” The next year, my friends and I tried out for and joined 5 Star’s cheer team, and the rest was history. Well…I guess it’s not that simple. You see, 8 year old Lauren saw the cheer world as a magical, talented, exciting new place. She looked up to the coaches, and the older cheerleaders in awe, and dreamt about the day she would be able to tumble, jump, and fly like they could. What she didn’t-or couldn’t-understand until much later was blood, sweat, pain, and tears (many many tears) that came along with wanting to be the best. More on that later though. 

​

I was the happiest little cheerleader I could be. I eagerly awaited during the day for the 3 nights of practice a week we had. I displayed my cheer bows proudly on top of my white dresser to the right of my bed. I proudly wore my team apparel to class, and talked about cheer constantly with my friends (probably a little too much). And I loved, absolutely LOVED being a flyer. It was kind of ironic; A girl deathly afraid of heights was utterly obsessed with being tossed way up in the air. For some reason, flying didn’t scare me in the beginning. The pangs of anxiety and knots in my stomach I later felt almost every time I stepped onto the mat started out as a whirlwind of butterflies purely from excitement. 

​

My three years at 5 Star I was coached by Coach Diana, or Coach D. Idolizing Coach D and the cheer world, I tried to be a model little cheerleader. At our hair and makeup seminar my second year, I felt like a superstar when she picked me to be her model. I sat in the center of the mat as Coach demonstrated to the parents how to do hair and makeup for competitions this year. However, there came a point where 5 Star cheer started to go downhill. Coach D had sold the gym and was no longer head coach, and there were other issues on teams that, honestly, I don’t really remember. I do remember a group of us making the decision to transfer gyms the next season to Mid Island Xtreme, or MIX, (which became Platinum Athletics Cheer after my first year). To be honest, I wasn’t sad about this decision. Maybe because I was still so young, or maybe because some of my closest friends were moving gyms with me. I know I thought the name of this gym sounded much cooler, and that seemed to be enough!

​

MIX was much farther away than 5 Star. Our parents planned a carpool rotation to drive us 45 minutes each way to and from practice three days a week. Practice was from 7-9pm which meant I had 2 hours from when school ended until we left. It also meant that dinner was eaten either at 530pm or in the car, and that I didn’t really start my homework until 10:30 after I got home and showered.  At first, I didn’t mind at all. I quite enjoyed spending time in the car. However, as I got older and school got harder, I gave up valuable time for sleep and homework traveling to and from practice. The writing on my assignments slowly progressed to messy scribbles thanks to stop signs and bumps in the road, jolting my notebook which I ever so carefully balanced on my knee while sitting in the passenger seat. I shoveled down cold grilled chicken out of a tupperware to fuel myself before enduring 2 hours of practice and conditioning.

​

When one of the assistant coaches, coach Stef, bought MIX, she renamed it Platinum Athletics Cheer, or PAC. My core memories from cheer all come from being on PAC, working my way up to higher levels of cheer. PAC was the rise and fall of my cheer career. It was the gym where I built a family. Where I learned the perseverance having passion gives you. Where I learned about teamwork, problem solving. It was also the gym where I fell out in love with a sport that became too much on my mind and body. It was the gym where I cried, fell, got hurt, got hurt again, put myself down, compared myself to others. You see, there are trade offs to everything. And there came a point where the shield that passion and undying love for cheer slowly began to fade away. So let’s get into it. Key points of my cheer journey; the ups, but mostly the downs. In a sport like cheer (yes, it is a sport, you’ll agree with me on this by the end if you don’t already), in or out of uniform, there’s no real break. 

– – 

We changed our pyramid stunt to increase difficulty points. Stef added a twist to the back tuck and an extra 2 sequences. I knew she meant business because she had us stretch in complete silence, and then get into our pyramid spots. “We’re going to run this until you get it right. So get it right.” She began to count, “5, 6, 7, 8”. I cleaned, put my hands on my bases shoulders, my right foot in their hands with my knee perfectly angled at 90 degrees, and took a deep breath in. We got through the beginning section with no problem, because not much changed there. On the back tuck twist though, I got stuck. Something rammed into my right hip, hard. My twist barely made it halfway around, and my body was suffering the consequences. “STOP” Stef yelled, “again.” So I set up, rolled back my shoulders, and took another deep breath in. Again and again. This time, my twist made it around (though barely). I sighed tentatively with relief, knowing the stunt was still far from over. 

The next sequence was also completely new. I hit the full up with ease, but then something went terribly wrong. It was all a blur, but I knew I was going down. I heard a crack as my white cheer shoes hit the blue mat. Immediately, a piercing throb shot from my left ankle throughout my entire body. All I could think to myself was don’t let them see you cry don’t cry don’t cry. But I couldn’t control it. My face was hot and my vision already blurry, I felt the tears colliding with the sweat on my face. The gym was silent, and all 32 eyes of my teammates were glued to the image of the girl lying on the floor, gripping her ankle in agonizing pain. Coach ran over and asked if I could get my shoe off. I nodded, still unable to speak. I remember feeling like my heart was going to explode, pure shock still racing through my body. I slowly took off my shoe, and slipped off my sock to reveal my ankle, swollen like a balloon. It was angled to the left, and it seemed a dark purple bruise had already developed over the outer part of my ankle. “It’s fine right, I’m fine?” I whimpered. Stef just looked at me with sympathy. No. I can’t be out for the season. I need to cheer. Emmie’s mom had driven us to practice, but had called mine and she was 25 minutes away. I was carried helplessly to a mat in the corner and brought an ice pack to put on my ankle for the time being. 

​

There are some main fears all cheerleaders have. The fear of falling during competition, the fear of being the weak link, and the fear of sitting out from injury. Little things compare to the devastation of working all season and having to watch the people you love compete in the sport you love from the sidelines. At this time in my cheer career, it had become my entire life. It was my passion, my home. Having that ripped out from under you, being completely helpless because of a freak accident is an indescribable, awful feeling. The doctor confirmed, my ankle was broken. I wanted so badly to ask the forbidden question, “How long am I out for?” But I couldn’t muster the courage. I didn’t want to know. Now, even with an injury, I still had to go to practice. Luckily, my broken ankle wasn’t too bad, and didn’t require intense healing or surgery. I was in constant contact with my doctor, itching at the opportunity to step back onto the mat. I don’t know how, because this surely changed later on, but despite my injury I had not an ounce of fear about getting back up in the air. So, after some rest and a whole lot of icing, I eagerly said yes at the first opportunity Coach asked me if I could practice again. First, I had to get the doctor to clear me. I was out of my cast, in a boot. I performed tests proving I could walk and balance. My doctor pushed down on the previously broken (and still bruised) bone, asking if it hurt. “Nope, doesn't hurt!” I lied through my gritted teeth. He reluctantly agreed to let me ease back into practices, only if I kept my ankle taped and iced it both before and after. 

​

Mistake. Because here I am, writing this in my junior year of college, left ankle permanently angled to the right. Cheering on a still broken ankle permanently messed it up. I went on to break it four more times throughout my life, including sophomore year of college from simply taking a wrong step, because my bone was so weak. I have a collection of braces (the black velcro one is an all-time favorite) that I often have to break out of the closet for days I’m taking long walks or on my feet a lot. At the time, cheering in that competition was all that mattered to me. In retrospect, I should have waited another week. Shouldn’t have folded to the pressure I felt to perform for my coach and for my team (and mostly, for myself), but that’s the way it goes in the cheer world. We don’t always think rationally because we have such a programmed mindset to do the best and the most we can regardless of the circumstances. 

– – 

Being a flyer requires an immense amount of body control and flexibility. It’s not enough to hit stunts, but you have to look flawless doing it. Because of this, we had to stretch extra every single day. I was expected to contort my body in unnatural ways, all while on one foot in the air. I was supposed to seamlessly completely straighten my leg behind my body while pointing my toe, perfectly do a bow and arrow, extending my arm out in front of my extended left leg. I was pretty flexible as a kid. I didn’t have difficulty with splits at all, so I assumed stunts would be a piece of cake. Boy was I wrong. Doing a split doesn’t compare to the strength and skill it takes to balance on one leg in the air, let alone while performing different stunt sequences. I was constantly, I mean constantly stretching. I watched TV in left leg splits. I did my homework in a middle split. I put my leg up against my closet door and practiced my heel stretch whenever I was bored at night. As Stef always said, you can’t be center flyer if you can’t straighten your leg in stunts. 

​

“You can’t just be good. You have to look the part.” Look the part. Who came up with that stupid phrase anyway? What does it even mean? In a sport like cheerleading, skill is a lot of it, but skill isn’t all of it. Pre competition consisted of spray tans, hairspray, hair curling, re-doing my bow a minimum of 15 times so it stands up perfectly in the center of my high pony. It meant spending 45 minutes on my makeup, strategically placing white glitter on the inside of my eyelid and blue glitter on the outside. It meant lining my lips like a 24 year old as a pre teen, and of course, it meant being skinny. Our gym had two nutritionists, Carly and Steven. Both were in their mid 20’s, both were ex cheerleaders, and both were two of the most in shape people I had ever met. Carly was 5 foot 7 with an 8 pack of abs clearly defined against her tan, toned body. We weren’t necessarily on restricted diets, per se. But even if we didn’t have nutritionists, all of us were careful about what we put into our body. 

​

I vividly remember one practice when I was 14. I had just gotten rid of a bad cold, so didn’t do extra at home conditioning exercises that week, and was exhausted. We were warming up our first individual stunts. For some reason, I just couldn’t get my body to turn 360 degrees in the full around. I would turn half way, and then come slowly down. I saw Stef shake her head at me in disappointment; rightfully so, because this was a stunt I hit perfectly just a few days ago. And then she said it. “Gosh Lauren, you feel so heavy today.” It’s one of the worst comments to hear as a flyer, and it’s said so often. Nobody wants to base or back a heavy flyer. Nobody wants to be known as the heavy flyer.  Nobody wants to be called, not even once, a heavy flyer. Because in this twisted world of cheer, being a heavy flyer meant you were far from looking the part. Now, I knew I wasn’t heavy. In fact, countless doctors had warned me about training so hard while being underweight. And I knew that you can feel heavier in a stunt some days than others. But still, words like that stick with you. Coach Stef yelled over to me, “Lauren! You have to pick up your chest, squeeze, and hold your own weight more.” I nodded, put my foot in my bases hands, lifted up my chest, closed my eyes, and hoped I could miraculously hold up all 99 pounds of myself in the next stunt. While there’s pressure for all cheerleaders to be skinny, there’s an extra level of anxiety surrounding weight for flyers. During AllStar cheer tryouts, we were all put in a straight line. Coach walked up and down the line, examining all of us. Then, she started calling us out. She picked out the tallest girls in line to be backspots. She picked out the smallest of us and said “flyers”, and then she matched similar heights of the remaining girls to be a pair of bases. This was not complete science, of course, and often was tweaked as we started practicing. However, it was pretty accurate, and a pretty common occurrence throughout cheer. The flyer is supposed to be the smallest or skinniest on the team, and preferably not too tall. This allows the stunt group to have an easier time lifting and throwing the flyer, and the flyer an easier time controlling her body in the air. 

​

Back to eating. I have been a picky eater since I was a baby. Joining the cheer world so young, I was raised being taught about what is good and bad to put in your body. Raised wishing I could be - and look like - the older girls at my gym. Carly and Steve ‘guided’ us in healthy eating. We were told to limit the intake of processed foods, fast foods, and sugary treats, but nobody was forbidding us from eating a donut or a cookie. However, there was some unspoken rule that we should be on diets. Almost everyone on my team, including myself, grew more and more careful about what we ate as we got older in the cheer world. As a 9 year old cheerleader, diet wasn’t a thought in my mind because I was, quite frankly, a stick, who didn’t need to worry about what she was putting in her body. As I grew older my body began to change - as one does when they get older - and my fear about my weight grew stronger. Looking back, I know I was still skinny, but not having the same solid abs and lean figure as before absolutely terrified me. It was stupid really, but the fear of not being the perfect skinny flyer ate me up inside. It started out as little things, like constantly looking in the mirror and thinking my 3 year old size XS practice spandex cut tighter into my stomach was detrimental. We conditioned for 40 minutes as a team after every practice. On top of that, we had specific workouts depending on our stunting position to do on days without practice. I started doubling these workouts, and I wasn’t the only one. I became increasingly conscious about what I ate, and was able to blame this on ‘always being a picky eater’. I stopped myself from indulging in snacks, fearful about what one cookie could do. This behavior and talk was entirely normalized in the cheer world, so I never thought anything about it. Comments like “I had a muffin for breakfast I hate myself” or group texts saying “I had a bowl of pasta I feel so large” were incredibly common. These comments were reinforced in the gym. I had been working out extra for a few weeks now, and was slowly getting myself back into ‘better’ shape. We were getting new alternate uniforms. Because cheer uniforms are often custom, Coach takes our measurements (in front of everybody, I might add) before ordering our sizes. I walked up to the front in my sports bra and spandex and held out my arms. “Oooo look at those muscles, I see you” Coach commented to me. I laughed it off, but deep down felt relieved. If Coach thought I looked the part, I must still be enough to be an AllStar flyer. Often in competitive sports, passion becomes blinding. The internal desire for validation in the cheer world soon consumed me. I was breaking my body stretching and working out outside of practice. I “wasn’t hungry” for breakfast or suddenly validated the idea that “it’s too much of a hassle to eat dinner in the car” before practice. I was agitated, stressed, anxious, and overall unhappy. 

​

The decision to stop AllStar cheer was a tough choice, but the right one to make. The gym didn’t feel like home anymore. My anxiety before competitions was so bad that I often threw up before taking the mat. Stunting became absolutely terrifying to me, and my body was severely under fueled. It happens. Sometimes a sport becomes too much as you get older. Some people can handle it, they can adapt, and I couldn’t. I wasn’t the only one. A few of my close friends also stopped cheering the same season I did. Everything in life is a trade off, and the trade off of hurting my mind and body, missing school, not having time to hang out with my friends, and generally not loving the sport anymore was far outweighing the trade off to compete for another season. It took lots of time to come to peace with this choice, and to talk to my coaches and teammates about it. It also took a lot of time to accept that I don’t need the title of cheerleader to be valued or great or successful, and that looking the part isn’t always worth it. There was so much more to me than AllStar cheer. I just had to give myself the chance to accept that chapter was over, and that it was the best decision to regain happiness, though I I did absolutely bawl my eyes out the following year watching videos and posts from my old teammates. 

​

Now, the irony of all of this is I still couldn’t rid myself of the cheer world for good. In 9th grade, I tried out for high school cheer and both was JV Captain during football season, and made the Varsity competition team. Yet again, here I was, practicing double for two teams. HS cheer was vastly different from AllStar, but nonetheless toxic. There were about 6 of us on HS cheer who had previously done AllStar, so we were a relatively good high school team. Sophomore to senior year, I was on Varsity/Varsity Competition. High School cheer was definitely more low stakes than AllStar in terms of time commitment and competitions. Nonetheless, there were days I dreaded walking into practice and times I felt utterly defeated while stunting. Of course, with high school cheer there were also some great memories with my friends, from our senior appreciation game to toilet papering the football players' houses the night before homecoming. Though I quit AllStar, HS cheer was a perfect transition to completely ease my way out of the cheer world. No, I take that back. To ease my way out of being a cheerleader. I will never be completely out of the cheer world, because there’s no way to forget such a long and crucial moment of your most formative years. I mean, here I am not having stepped on a blue mat since 2019, still writing about my experience. 

​

While this is a very incomplete picture of my cheer journey, it touches on key moments I still remember years later. The cheer world is incredibly misjudged by anyone not actually inside of it. It’s not all butterflies and rainbows like 7 year old me imagined, but it is far from just a sideline activity. There are so many lessons cheer has taught me that I apply in my everyday life, whether it be in school (yes, I do credit cheer for time management skills) or in my incredibly ambitious personality. But there’s so much more to the sport that’s harder to put into words, harder to talk about. Falling out of love with a sport that used to be your entire life is quite literally devastating. It feels like a part of your identity was ripped from you, and now you’re left to rediscover who you are without this fundamental piece of yourself. But, ultimately, I regret none of it. I’ve learned to look in the mirror and accept the fact that I no longer (and shouldn’t) have the body of an AllStar cheerleader, that food is fuel. That injuries do not mean your weak, and pushing your body to the breaking point will, quite literally, break you. 

​

I’ll leave you with this. Cheer is badass. But it’s also more work than you could ever imagine, both mentally and physically. Anything you do in life, you have to ultimately weigh the ups and downs. Sports especially are no different. But, clearly, things in the industry need to change. There needs to be visibility and support for cheerleaders. I went through it, so many others are probably dealing with the same struggles right now, and continuing because the adrenaline of competing at Worlds or feeling of winning first makes every second worth it. But there comes a time and a place where one chapter of your life has to close so a new chapter can begin. Here I am, a junior in college, forever grateful for my time as a cheerleader and (though there are times I miss it) perfectly happy not stepping out on the mat again.

 

So I took my uniform out of my closet, admired it for a few minutes, and held it up to me in front of my closet mirror, flooded with memories of the feeling of the sequins on the sleeves against my arms, the way the mini skirt rose up as I tumbled across the mat. Then, I hung it hidden in the back of my closet. It would never be worn again, (I doubt it would even fit) but it would sit there, serving as a reminder of what once was.