Every athlete can benefit from a sport, and one of those sports is weightlifting.
“Weightlifting should be a sport that you automatically have your other athletes do whether it’s basketball, football, soccer, cheerleading,” Arnold High School Cheerleading Coach Sharon Gilson said.
“The biggest thing that I see with weightlifting is that it helps all sports,” North Bay Haven Weightlifting Coach Lisa Garrett said. “Not just their physical fitness, but it helps with cheerleading, softball, volleyball.”
More and more females are picking up and adding weightlifting on their list of sports they’re involved in in high school.
“Well, it keeps my whole body in shape,” Arnold High School Cheerleader and Weightlifter Lexi Moeschl said.
“I know a lot of sports don’t want the girls, or the boys for that matter, to compete in two sports because sometimes they overlap,” Gilson said. “However, our girls, or our kids in generally, need to be doing everything they can when they’re in high school.”
Being in weightlifting and other sports can help girls develop into stronger athletes. But, it can be difficult to find the time.
“It’s actually a lot of hard work,” Arnold High School Cheerleader and Weightlifter Sadie Vann said. “We do four practices a week with Coach Flague, our weightlifting coach, and sometimes we’ll do Fridays, but we actually do two days a week with our competition cheer team and it’s hard to. We either chose to go to both, or we’ll chose to go to one or the other.”
“Time management and school along with it is very hard,” Moeschl said.
Hard, but worth it.
“Strengthening helps against injury prevention, but it also helps you to develop explosiveness and quickness, and all those things that’re going to pay off in whatever sport you chose to compete in,” Port St. Joe Weightlifting Coach Robert Alexander said.
“It makes us stronger when we do our routine. It makes us stronger for tumbling, it’s crazy,” Vann said. “I would encourage it for a bunch of girls do to weightlifting that also involves cheerleading with them.”
So for those worried that adding more routines to athletes schedules could strain them, Garrett says it won’t.
“Every girl on my team is involved in two or three sports. It’s definitely helped them out in the preseason and off-season in weightlifting,” Garrett said.
“With these girls doing weightlifting, hopefully they’ll not only do many other sports, but with the weightlifting, that’s a lifetime sport,” Gilson said.
Moeschl and Vann finished third last weekend in FHSAA’s Region 1 cheerleading competition at Marianna High School. After competing, both traveled to Choctaw to compete in their weightlifting regional. Moeschl placed first in her weight class, Vann placed fourth.
Courtesy of: WJHG