Chelsea is very well known for having sports be a big part of the community; it’s one of the things that people here take the most pride in. With an emphasis on our school’s football team, a sport that people never really talk about is cheerleading. Cheerleaders bring pride to the football field every Friday night, whether the game is at home or two hours away.

In the two years senior Katelyn Naebeck has been at Chelsea, the cheer team has always practiced at Pierce Lake, which is a former elementary school that has been closed for nearly 13 years and used for various purposes. However, the school district has recently planned to open it as an early childhood and community education center, giving the cheerleaders a place to practice.

“We always have our practice at Pierce,” Naebeck said. “During the summer, we would have morning practices, some at the field occasionally, but only if we were doing conditioning or working on sidelines.”

Sideline cheer may have an easy fix, especially with the season almost over, but with the sideline season ending and competitive cheer starting to come into play, the team will be facing more struggles.

‘It’ll definitely be harder for the comp season to have somewhere to practice rather than sideline.” Naebeck said, “They don’t really have anywhere to go because it’s cold outside, so it’s really like kicking them to the curb.”

With the many places Chelsea has to offer for indoor practices, including the WSEC gym, main high school gym, and aux gym, everything seems to be taken up, leaving the cheer team to fend for themselves.

“They could try to fight for time in the auxiliary gym.” Naebeck says, “But that’s not really ideal because practices would run late; it would just be super late evening practices every day.”

Pierce Lake reopening may seem like a beneficial new thing, but we’re leaving our cheer team with nothing but leftovers.