More than
meets the eye: Cheerleaders are no strangers to hard work

By PAUL COSTANZO • Times Herald • January 21, 2009

PROTECTION:
Rylie Joachim of St. Clair wears knee braces, an
ankle brace and tape around both wrists for support while doing cheers.
(Times Herald photo by WENDY TORELLO)

Capac High School's cheer team executes a pose, Wednesday January 7, 2009, during the BWAC Competitive Cheer Jamboree I at Yale High School. By MELISSA WAWZYSKO, Times
Herald

Algonac High School's cheer team leaps in unison, Wednesday January 7, 2009, during the BWAC Competitive Cheer Jamboree I at Yale High School. By MELISSA WAWZYSKO, Times
Herald

Richmond High School's cheer team strikes a pose, Wednesday January 7, 2009, during the BWAC Competitive Cheer Jamboree I at Yale High School. By MELISSA WAWZYSKO, Times
Herald

Rylie Joachim should be on a
cheerleading poster.

With braces on both knees and her
left ankle and tape around both of her wrists, the St. Clair senior is more
the face of cheerleading than Kirsten Dunst or any
of the other actresses in "Bring It On."

"There's always people
getting punched, kicked, thrown over -- it's just a general thing every
day," Joachim said, her voice a bit scratchy after leading cheers at
practice for more than two hours Jan. 9, one day before attending a
competition in Novi.

"They think we're more like
ditzy, don't do much, but we do just as much as those football players do.

"We're constantly moving,
constantly working. We stay determined. We dedicate ourselves every single
day. It's what we do.

"It's our life."

Competitive cheer is a sport
recognized by the Michigan High School Athletic Association and consistently
has one of the highest injury risks in the sporting world.

But there are plenty of naysayers
out there.

"If (people) are not educated
about what cheerleading is today, they're just like, 'yeah, yeah,
yeah,'" first-year Richmond cheer Coach Kelli Matthes said. "If they come to practice, they change
their mind."

When you watch the Saints
practice, hearing coach Amanda Lipke tell her team
their hair has to be styled a certain way for the Novi competition may create false
impressions. Then you'll see a stretch that looks more like it came out of the
Dick Cheney playbook than cheerleading camp.

You'll have to try not to get
distracted by the fact it smells like someone opened a Bath&Body
Works store in the Riverview East High School weight room, because you'd miss
an easiest-to-hardest warmup that starts with
handstands.

Those things are nothing compared
to rest of the practice.

"We're always really sore,
and we usually ice ourselves and take it easy at nighttime so we don't die
before our competition," St. Clair senior Alicia Laurain
said. "It's a lot of time that you have to put into it, and it's a lot
of hard work, and you're really sore and tired all the time."

That's not just at St. Clair. It
goes for every successful cheer program. Matthes,
who won a state championship with L'Anse Creuse North in 2006, said she's had
wrestlers join a practice who left speechless.

Sheryl Van Buren, whose Memphis team performed Jan. 1 during
halftime at the Capital One Bowl in Orlando, Fla., has had similar experiences with
boys.

"We had the boys last homecoming, and they wanted to do
stunting," Van Buren said. "They put up one of the smaller boys and
were like, 'Holy cow, that was hard.'

"We hear that a lot. People
don't realize what these girls are doing and the work that goes into doing
this."

Much of the work -- and danger --
happens when performing stunts.

Most of the first hour of St.
Clair's practice is spent working on the third and final round of the
upcoming competition, which involves the lifting and tossing similar to what
you can see on ESPN2 on a random early afternoon.

This hour, Lipke
is trying to perfect every detail -- from the smiles on the girls' faces and
the inflections of their voices to proper twisting on their tosses.

Meanwhile, the nine base position
cheerleaders are doing an hour's worth of military presses and bicep curls,
all while screaming out a cheer in unison.

"To lift and yell is probably
the hardest," Joachim said. "When you're yelling and trying to be
tight and punch at the same time, it takes everything you have."

The first two rounds of
competition are filled with requirements from different disciplines,
including flexibility, jumping and tumbling. And, of course, more cheering.
The key here is precision, and every little bit counts.

As the Saints go through the
routines, piece by piece, Lipke again finds
individual missteps that, however small, could cost points.

"All I can see is your
thumb," she directs at a team member whose fist isn't closed properly.

"That jump is off -- it's
about a six right now," she yells toward the entire team.

"When they get pushed hard,
they do well," Lipke said. "I think they
like to work hard.

"The thing with competitive
cheer is it's all about being nice and tight, and nice and clean. That's why
we keep drilling it over and over."

The drilling from that practice
paid off for the Saints; they won the Novi competition.

The "they won" part is
what they'd like you to pay attention to if you continue to doubt what they
do.

"Everybody has a different
opinion of what a sport is, but to me it is a sport -- we work just as hard,
if not twice as hard, as a lot of the teams out there," St. Clair
sophomore Hannah Quick said.

"We win, too. We go to
competitions, and we do more than just sitting on the sidelines of other
people's games."