Sports Reporter
The average college student thinks that he doesn’t get enough sleep. The average college student-athlete believes he gets even less sleep. Meet the two guys on campus that really don’t get any sleep.
“I’ve got football lifting at six in the morning Monday, Wednesday, and Friday,” Jai Johnson said. “Then cheer practice at six in the morning Tuesday, and Thursday.”
Freshman wide receiver Connor Charlesworth and freshman running back Jai Johnson are not only members of the CMU football team – they are CMU cheerleaders too.
Coming to CMU on football scholarships, they show their Maverick pride by cheering during the offseason.
“I started cheer my sophomore year of high school” Johnson said. “I had a knee injury during the football season, and tried cheer for the first time after the season was over.”
Charlesworth played high school football and joined cheer after doing his head coach a favor.
“My head football coach’s wife was the cheer coach at my high school,” Charlesworth said. “And one day my senior year he asked me to go out for the team. They didn’t have enough guys on the team, and my coach knew I would be cool about it.”
Both players are very aware of the stigma that goes along with being a male cheerleader.
“You know the guys on the team joke a little bit,” Johnson said. “But they never are jerks about it or anything. They’re all just joking around.”
Charlesworth knows that many people believe that male cheerleaders are gay, but that isn’t the case.
“It’s really not gay,” Charlesworth said. “A lot of guys say that if you’re a male cheerleader then you’re gay. That’s not true. I don’t know how they can say it’s gay. You’re around girls all day.”
Both players are planning on cheering as long as they are at CMU, as long as their bodies hold up to the demand of being dual-sport athletes.
Despite splitting time between two teams, Charlesworth and Johnson find family in both sports.
“Both football and cheer, their both just really great groups of people,” Johnson said. “They’re like two families.”
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