My name is Dehlia Lussier and I am a senior at Wesley Chapel high school entering my fourth year on the varsity cheerleading team. Cheerleading is a sport that has greatly enhanced my high school journey. Cheerleading is a sport that has taught me many lessons about leadership and cooperation. Cheerleading is a sport with a challenging degree of competition versus my peers. Cheerleading is a sport that requires a tremendous athletic effort. Cheerleading is a sport with a high rate of injury which requires perseverance and determination to overcome. Cheerleading is a sport.

As I enter my senior year with another year of AP and honors courses, I find myself one required credit short of what is necessary to graduate. A “credit” that is granted with no hesitation to any other student in the state of Florida who competes as a two year varsity athlete. Every student. In any high school. Any athlete. Well, any athlete of course, except cheerleaders in Pasco County.

In my 4 years of cheerleading I have competed at some of the biggest athletic venues in the State of Florida such as the University of Florida and ESPN Wide World of Sports (notice it doesn’t say Wide World of Hobbies). I’ve stood on one leg while being held over other girl’s heads. I’ve been dropped from standing on one leg while being held over other girl’s heads. I’ve been in an emergency room with a massively swollen ankle scared my absence while recovering would negatively impact my team. I’ve flipped backwards and upside down twist to find my feet and stand back up and show my school spirit while doing it.

Cheerleading, you see, isn’t just a sport. It’s an interdisciplinary athletic endeavor with tumbling, stunting, and dance that requires a performance while doing it. Imagine if the baseball team, football team, or volleyball team stopped in the middle of their game to loudly cheer and encourage school spirit? That’s essentially what we do. We are actually more than just athletes, but no argument can be made that we are not athletes. Similar to the other student athletes at our school, we pay the annual athletic fee. We practice in our gym. We utilize our schools weight room. We do everything other athletes do, only to be told our sport isn’t as worthy to receive the same exemption to HOPE as any other sport.

In addition, cheerleading is a full year commitment. We cheer as a squad for school spirit but we also have our own separate competition season as well. When the football season ends and we are done cheering for them, football goes into their off-season. We, however, do not. That is just the beginning for us. That is when we begin choreographing our routine which we spend months perfecting, and will go on to perform at different high schools and venues across the state.

Not allowing two years as a varsity cheerleader to fulfill the physical education/HOPE requirement is not only outdated but it punishes some of the most academically promising students you have in your schools. Having to take HOPE actually hurts my GPA since all the classes I take are either weighted to 4.5 or 5.0. I believe this policy is from a time when girls were stereotyped and cheer was far less athletically competitive than it is now. Cheerleading is, in fact, recognized as a sport that can be used as a waiver for HOPE in many other Florida counties outside of Pasco. I believe continuing this policy allows for the vestiges of sexism that we have fought so hard to redefine to punish us as female athletes in 2021.

I hope after some careful consideration that you will see that this is not only an unfair and outdated policy, but with the explosion of cheerleading as one of the most competitive sports in the nation and the recent inclusion of cheerleading by the IOC this policy is punitive to some of the hardest working high school athletes we have in the state of Florida. I urge you to take immediate action to rectify this and allow for cheerleading as a varsity athlete to count as the physical education/HOPE requirement.