Quite a few times I was challenged on this subject, quite a few times by football players, and each time I gave each of them the same argument:
“You throw a 15 ounce ball across a field, and hopefully, someone catches it. Most of the time, you don’t (they were bad). What happens when you drop it? what happens if you don’t catch it? coach gets pissed, your teammates are let down for the rest of the game. Nobody is hurt. It’s nothing you can’t make up for next game. I lift a human, weighing in the low to mid 100-lb range, over my head. What happens if I drop her? If she is lucky, a twisted ankle, some bruises. If she isn’t lucky, broken bones, paralysis, or death. She doesn’t have a helmet on with all of todays modern technology in safety, and neither do I. My teammates won’t be over that the next game. Where you have about a 50% margin for error in your game, I have 0.”

And to this day, that argument has never lost. And it is a reality that many people don’t entirely understand. It has gotten better, but it still needs to come a long way. Cheerleading is both DANGEROUS, and a SPORT. It requires a great deal of skill not seen in any other sport. Where other sports have helmets, and protective gear, we don’t. I had this painfully beat into me in camp, when several times my flyer came down cracking me in the face. Why? because I took the hit to keep her off the floor, off the ground. I caught her even though she was spinning arms out towards me. and to this day, I would do it over and over. Which brings me to my next point, that this sport shares a bond that no teammates in any other sport share. I had that bond with my flyer, that she could trust in me 110% that I had her back. That no matter what, I was sacrificing my own body to make sure she stayed safe. That if she slipped, she screwed up, I screwed up, she would be caught before the ground. In camp, I learned to understand the full importance of this. I got the chance, (at 235lbs?) to be a flyer myself. There were two big guys in the camp that were able to boost me up into the air, and I have to say, seeing the world 10-12 feet above the ground with nothing keeping you from the ground except the hands of two other people, or in some cases one, is both terrifying and thrilling at the same time. At that point, you gain the perspective of just how important the person below you really is, and because of that, I was.

I was very active in promoting the squad within the school and recognizing it as a sport. I had built a website well known within the school, which later featured pictures taken of the squad at events, and was visited 1,000s of times.

I can share your anger in not being in the yearbook, as the person in charge of making sure everyone was present for photos of the various groups failed to contact me. I to this day do not know if this was accidental or intentional. but I got the last laugh when I found that I was featured, participating in one of the stunts, on the front cover of the yearbook.

Well, senior year tryouts rolled around, our COACH (see how they get that same title? its a SPORT….) was retiring, a new coach who decided just to do it out of fun (and in my eyes just to shoo-in her daughter) and left me out, bringing in 5 new inexperienced guys, who just happened to be former football players (that’s what I get for running my mouth). Well, the team pretty much collapsed, they were invited to participate in higher competition but declined, and then I heard the day one of the guys dropped one of the flyers. It had been one of the flyers I practiced with in camp, one that was in my tryout group. It just goes to show, some guys, trained to handle things with brute force, cannot handle anything more than that.

I must apologize for jacking your comments, but I just thought I would let you know that I am not a feminist, but I agree wholeheartedly with the same beliefs.

I definitely believe this is true…and this doesn’t just happen with feminists. In our society, redirecting anger at “safer” targets is pretty common. Just look at the tea party — all that anger they have, redirected from the people and systems that caused their problems onto people who didn’t.