This story is syndicated from The Union St. Journal, the newspaper of Cherry Creek High School in Greenwood Village, CO. The original version of the story ran here.
Most male athletes don’t worry about being sexualized when playing a sport. But for many female athletes, including the award-winning poms and cheer teams at Cherry Creek, this harassment isn’t an anomaly.
“[When we are dancing to a] Justin Timberlake or Britney Spears type of song, where it’s more sensual, people take it a little bit differently,” senior and captain of the varsity poms team Annika Rouse said. “They take it more as a sexual dance rather than just a dance to be shared amongst our peers.” During the majority of the school year, most of the girls on these teams are used to receiving uncomfortable and dehumanizing comments, as well as getting constantly sexualized and harassed. But because the comments don’t stop, most of the athletes learn how to move past and ignore them.
“It doesn’t really phase me personally when comments are made,” senior varsity cheerleader Elena Pombo said over text interview. “Sure, there are comments here and there, but it’s pretty normal for a performance-based sport where we’re always on display.”
For a lot of athletes, the constant feeling of needing to hype up the crowd and properly represent the school is difficult. Working to always impress students while feeling like they’re on ‘display’ often leads to an uncomfortable feeling when performing.
“We’re publicly displayed in front of our student body every single Friday or every single day. It just kind of sucks.” Rouse said.
While cheer and poms are both popular sports, they are both severely underappreciated because of this outlook.
“[It] breaks my heart that they’re subject to that, and it breaks my heart that they don’t get the recognition for what they’re actually doing,” head poms coach Alex Limberius said.
The girls on these teams are just like any other athlete — dedicated competitors who have little free time because they spend hours and hours a week practicing to make sure that they can perfect their skills and become the best they can be. But these comments deteriorate the respect they deserve.
Worse, when hearing these sexualizing comments, they have severely limited options in how and if they are allowed to respond.
“We have to keep dancing, because obviously, when you’re dancing, you don’t have that time to talk to people,” Rouse said. “Usually when we get those types of comments during our dancing, or if we hear things, it makes us want to do better and to go bigger.”
Girls on the poms and cheer teams get sexualized in part because of what they wear, but they should be able to participate in their sport without being forced to adapt to disrespect.
While the uniforms are designed in part to make the team look better, they are mostly for function. Pom uniforms have to allow dancers to kick high without having extra material bunching up and getting in the way of their performance. Cheer uniforms have to be out of the way so that when they are flying or lifting others up, the fit doesn’t cause distractions or injuries hindering their performance.
“We pay lots of money just to get those [uniforms] and we want to be able to show them to our student body,” Rouse said.
It’s ludicrous that a uniform designed for practicality is causing girls to get sexualized. These girls have pushed past this constant sexualization; however, it shouldn’t be something that is normalized, and rather, needs to be stopped. This problem extends past the field and past just the cheer and poms teams.
“Women get sexualized no matter if they’re wearing swimsuits or sweatpants, so I think it’s better to alter our uniforms to fit our needs [with both looks and function] than to avoid the comments and judgment of others,” Pombo said.
The athletes should be able to wear what they want, without feeling nervous about getting sexualized, especially when participating in school events and sports. There should be no reason why girls should hear inappropriate and sickening comments about their uniforms which they pridefully strive to wear.
Everyone should be able to participate in their sport or go about their daily activities no matter the outfit without getting sexualized. Students need to start having respect for one another and allow for a safe environment for people to participate in their sports without harassment.
