A color guard member trains for hours in the hot sun, bruises and exhaustion built up from practice the day before, only to hear ‘’Colorguard is too emotional and too easy to be a sport’,  a boy strives for greatness, training his endurance and speed to prove his talent on track, yet his teammates claim “you have to be tall and skinny to be the fastest on track. It’s just simple science!”, and a cheerleader spends hours, days, weeks, even months of her time to become better each year, but she knows the consistent thoughts of her naive peers: “Cheer? It’s interesting, but it doesn’t require nearly as much work and training as football or soccer.” 

These negative, discouraging, and hypercritical stereotypes, especially the kind that results in false accusations of one’s sport and personal characteristics, are the most effective at harming an athlete’s emotional well-being and motivation. 

“It made me realize how [color] guard isn’t really advertised pretty well,” says Evelyn Mullix. 

She has been a member of color guard since her freshman year and is currently in leadership for color guard. 

In color guard, members will practice for hours after school, training their hand-eye coordination, facing the blinding sun, strange winds, and even the unreliable speakers. Yet, each member can consistently catch their rifles and flags through tracking the flags’ movement, while holding a consistent smile on their faces. This isn’t an easy sport, nor something that allows a plethora of emotions to be shown live. And yet the stereotype for color guard remains: that their sport is not a sport, that it’s easy, and is emotional when their training and live performances show otherwise.

“You see it like once in pep assemblies or even football games where people walk away,” Mullix said. “Even in band, people are like ‘Oh! throwing a pop toss, great! so easy,’ but when they actually try the move, the response is always  ‘Oh my gosh, this is so hard.’”

Even in cheer, members of other sports teams have claimed that Cheer doesn’t require nearly the same amount of work as other sports, and even claim that it’s not a sport because of this.

“Over the summer, we practice every three days every week in the mornings for two-and-a-half hours and then three to four practices a week during the school year,” Amelia Iden says.

Iden has been on the cheerleading team since sixth grade. She has spent multiple unruly summers training for performances along with her teammates, making her performances look flawless and beautiful. But behind this beauty is strength and dedication to literally holding her team up. The average teenage girl (age 17) weighs about 143 pounds, and in each performance, members of the team are thrown into the air with what appears to be ease. 

“We work just as hard as everyone else, and our season is the longest in the school. This [stereotype] does not make us not-athletes,” Iden said.“It’s taught me to be stronger than other people’s opinions.”

“Most runners are known to be tall and scrawny, and… I am not that. I’m usually on the muscular side and shorter,” said Antony Casillas.

Antony Casillas has been in track and field since eighth grade, but throughout Casillas’s time on track and field, this stereotype had consistently bothered him. The more he heard the stereotype, the more he began to question his time on track.

“We will often go to Legacy Park, and we see people looking at us,  and we go to races, and people will ask questions, and then he (a teammate) will think as a joke that they (the people questioning them) will think he’s the fastest based on his appearance compared to me. where I wouldn’t even look like a runner just on that physical aspect,” Casillas said.

However, Casillas is still on track and field, his senior year of high school. 

Instead of letting this stereotype bring him down, he used it to motivate himself to train and become the best racer he could be. No matter what the stereotypes were, Casillas used the stereotypes to help him grow as a person and as an athlete.

However, while a stereotype has the potential to benefit an athlete, it’s very emotionally scarring. This leads to most athletes preferring their peers avoid using stereotypes to form their judgements of a sport.

“Sometimes it feels like a personal attack. These people don’t even know you; they are judging you just because,” Mullix said.