If you play a sport at Ripon High, most know that you get 5 points per year. Sports like football, volleyball, golf, water polo, and many more are rewarded with school credit- all except for cheerleading. Cheerleading only gives you 2.5 credits every year, even though it is just as physically straining as most of these other sports.

As you may know, cheerleading has 3 positions- flyers, tumblers, and bases. All of these roles in the cheerleading team are very important, and extremely difficult to perform. Not only are the moves themselves straining, the workouts leading up to it are also strenuous. Emme Wilbur, a flyer for the Ripon High cheerleading team, says that, “Sometimes we do conditioning in cheer like mountain climbers and planks and running, doing a lot of cardio…” Wilbur also goes into detail about the arm workouts they must perform, and other workouts to improve stamina, as the cheers and stunts they pull off are demanding. The cheerleading team does just as much workout as any of the other sports, like football and volleyball, and the stunts themselves are even more labor-intensive than certain workouts. “I would really like to see a lot of the other sports that do get all five credits throw girls up in the air and dance for 2 minutes and 30 seconds straight while also smiling and looking like it’s easy, because it’s not,” continued Wilbur.

Cheerleading has proven to be tiring and labor intensive. Cheerleading has all of the work a sport like volleyball or basketball would have, proving to possibly be even more stringent. With all of these components, is giving cheerleaders  2.5 credits a year instead of 5 really doing them justice?