Doing both school cheer and allstar cheer can be quite challenging. Juggling games, competitions and practices for both teams can be very stressful. From personal experience I had to miss a few of my school cheer games due to allstar cheer practices. During basketball season my allstar team would practice from 7:30-9:00pm, which conflicted with the boys basketball games.  So, for the whole basketball season I would only be able to cheer for the girl’s basketball games. I would then have to leave for practice when it was the boy’s turn. It was a lot on me. I always had to make sure that I packed my allstar cheer practice wear in my backpack along with my school cheer gear.
 

Being apart of both teams can also be stressful. You always have to make sure that you are on top of everything since there is so much on your plate.  ALWAYS have to keep your grades up, and make sure that you are on time for both teams. You have to make sure that you aren’t slacking on any team. My school will “bench” you if your grades aren’t maintained. This means you can not cheer until you got your grades up. I never had to endure that, but I felt like it helped a lot of girls on my school cheer team because it made them work hard for what they wanted. Therefore, if they didn’t work hard and keep their grades up, they wouldn’t cheer.
 

While juggling both teams you have to keep a level head the whole time because it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the amount of things happening. The stress really comes in when you have late practice times and then you have to figure out when is the best time for homework and then sleep.  A great piece of advice is to plan your days out and create an organized schedule so that you’ll know when everything is supposed to happen. Hence, you’ll become more organized and it will hopefully ease the stress a little. Also, try and get your homework done before you start your school cheer activities. What I mean by this is try and get as much homework done as possible during school hours after you finish with classwork. I would always finish with my classwork early, and I would ask my teacher for my homework if she hadn’t already given it to us. Then I would start working on my assignments.  With my homework out of the way, I was able to focus more in my late night practices.
 

Most importantly make sure that you can handle it all and that you aren’t putting too much on your plate. Once it starts to affect you and your academics then it’s now a problem that must be addressed. Balance is the key in being successful in school and on both cheer teams.