“I started competitive cheer last year near the beginning of the year. I found out that they were recruiting people and they said they needed a base. I cheer in downtown Lawrence at G-Force, which is a big gym with multiple teams. I’m on the team Hawks, which is a level three team. I really enjoy how close everybody is. I love the family aspect, and I love how it’s more difficult and it pushes you a lot more than high school cheer does. Because we are competing all the time, we’re always working together and doing conditioning together. With competitive cheer, there’s no yelling cheers, there’s no doing pretty much any of the things you think of when you think of cheer. We do a lot of stunting, tumbling and jumps. We have two team practices a week, and we also have to take two tumbling classes a week. Because of high school cheer, I kind of have to squish them together on my free days. Usually we will have a competition once a month.”