Athlete signings are common for high school players. If someone excels at their sport, they often get a chance to continue competing at the next level.
Football, basketball, soccer and baseball are just a few sports where graduating seniors continue playing as college freshmen.
(Courtesy of Sunlake High School)
Cheerleaders, however, are now becoming part of that group.
Skye Nichols, a captain for Sunlake High School’s state championship cheerleading team, will attend Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut, and compete for the school.
But technically, it won’t be cheerleading. The Bobcats have an acrobatics and tumbling team, and Nichols was recruited to be a member of the squad.
“I feel very blessed. That’s the only way I can describe it,” she said. “I only dreamt about it, and I still can’t believe it’s reality.”
The Bobcats do have a spirit squad, but Nichols isn’t planning on participating. That group performs more of the traditional cheerleading functions, but the acrobatics and tumbling team is part of a sport, which suits her better.
They’ll have a schedule where they square off against other teams in group and individual categories, and do extensive traveling to compete in different locations around the country.
While Nichols is excited to be part of the competition, she realizes it will mean a lot more work. Rigorous practices and weight training are just part of the schedule, and she’ll have to balance that with pursuing her studies in sports management.
But her cheerleading coach at Sunlake, Pennye Garcia, believes Nichols’ time as a cheerleader has her well-equipped to succeed.
“It’s her drive,” Garcia said. “When she really wants something, she will keep working at it.”
Nichols was a team captain, and was called upon to not only study technique and offer corrections, but also motivate her teammates when they were losing focus, Garcia said. Her ability to remain motivated while also motivating others helped separate her from less-driven athletes.
Nichols believes the leadership role helped her as well.
“I definitely think it gave me experience how to work with people, and how the best way in working with people is leading by example,” she said. “Also, being friends with them makes a big difference. If you’re just strict all the time, I feel like you kind of lose respect, but you’ve got to care about them to earn respect.”
But there’s also a physical aspect to cheerleading, and Garcia said it revolves around strength. As a base — someone who stays at the bottom of the formation and helps support others — Nichols needs good leg strength. Those physical skills helped her get recruited by Quinnipiac.
And while Nichols feels the school is a perfect fit for her, it wasn’t part of her original plan. Her first choice of school didn’t work out, and her path wasn’t shaping up the way she wanted.
But when she visited the Quinnipiac’s campus, she realized that the new opportunity was actually better than her planned one.
“Right when I went to the school I was like, this couldn’t have been any better for me,” she said. “It just felt so right.”
School also is important to Nichols, whose GPA is 4.05. She considers herself to be competitive and something of a perfectionist, and while that’s translated to success in the classroom and on the mat, she believes that self-confidence and hard work will help her face the coming challenges of a new city, new school and a new level of competition.
“I think anything you do that’s really new is a little nerve-racking, but I just believe in myself that I can handle it,” Nichols said. “I pushed myself really hard these four years, and I think that definitely conditioned me for the next four years.”
Published May 28, 2014
