Cheerleader by Day, Bartender by Night

It’s bar close at Whiskey Jacks Saloon on State Street, and the floor is sticky. Security is pushing out the last group of people who swear they “know the owner.” The music is still blaring for how late it is, and behind the bar, UW cheerleader Shayla Schulz is doing dishes and wiping down the counter where multiple drinks were spilled.

Most students go to the bars to escape the stress of college. Schulz clocks in. And she does it knowing she has to be at lift at 6 am.

Schulz is living a double life that most students wouldn’t survive a week. At Wisconsin, she is a D1 cheerleader who spends her mornings tumbling, lifting, stunting, and spending hours in Camp Randall, the Kohl Center, or the Field House supporting the Badgers. But she’s also a bartender at one of Madison’s busiest student bars, working nights that can stretch until 4 a.m., long after her classmates have gone home. Her teammates joke she’s insane. She usually agrees. 

Shayla didn’t grow up thinking she’d be this person. She was a dancer before anything else. Cheer came after COVID when she was entering high school, trying to figure out how to socialize again, and tried out for her school’s team, just hoping to find something that felt normal. 

She ended up being good at it. Then better than good. She grew up going to Badger games, so Wisconsin was always her dream school. Eventually, cheering at Wisconsin became a real possibility. Now she’s here, and she’s paying for it in more ways than one. 

A typical day for Schulz is a puzzle of timing and sacrifice. She’s out the door at 5:30 a.m. to get to weight training. Classes take up her entire midday. She fits homework and chores into random windows of time…when she’s lucky. Evenings are either practice, home games, or shifts behind the bar. 

“I’ve had to find routines and certain times of the day to do certain things, otherwise they simply won’t get done. Some days I just have to sit and decide what can wait because I don’t have enough hours in the day,” she said. 

There is nothing glamorous about it. She rarely gets eight hours of sleep. Six is the bare minimum. She forces herself to take at least one night a week to do things normal college students do, like hanging out with her roommates and friends, watching movies, or going out.

People don’t understand what NCAA cheer actually is or demands. 

“I truly don’t think people understand how much time and dedication is put into cheer alone. We have 6 am lift, then three-hour practices, and we have to attend every single home women’s basketball game, men’s basketball game, volleyball game, and football game. Then on top of that, traveling to represent the school when teams make it to postseason tournaments,” Schulz said. 

That doesn’t even include the physical toll. Tumbling and stunting are extremely high-impact. In the Field House during practice, the sound is sharp. Sneakers squeaking hard against the mat, bodies hitting the floor, spotters yelling quick counts. Chalk dust hangs in the air, and the music is always too loud. It’s not cute. It’s a contact sport disguised in bows and rhinestones. There is no room for error when a person is being thrown twenty feet in the air. “Every single practice people are falling off pyramids twenty feet in the air is prone to injure someone,” she said. 

One manager who works with her remembers a night after a home football game when they were closing down Whiskey Jacks. Schulz finally sat down at the bar, and she looked exhausted. “She said she just needed a minute because she had done 56 standing back tucks during the game before her shift. That was apparently the most she’s ever done in a day,” her manager said. 

Schulz doesn’t take on all of this just to say she’s busy. She does it because she’s thinking past college. In the future, she is hoping to attend law school, and in order to do that, she needs a high GPA and a stacked resume. She wants to set herself up so she can be a successful adult after college. 

“My biggest motivator is thinking the better my GPA and the more I involve myself in now, the more it will pay off,” she said. 

She doesn’t want her life to peak at Wisconsin, she wants it to be where she began. 

There’s something incredible about the difference between who she is at 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. At night, she’s serving shots to students who only care about the next round. In the morning, she’s standing in the weight room training like a real athlete in one of the biggest athletic departments in the country. 

She knows this chapter won’t last forever. After graduation and ideally law school, she eventually wants to move out west. This is the chapter of her life where she’s figuring out what she wants and testing her limits. She does this not because she has to prove anything to anyone, but because she’s curious what she’s capable of. 

“I would say that juggling both roles changed the way I see myself by helping me realize I truly can do a lot more than I thought I was capable of. I sometimes don’t know how I do it, but for the most part, I juggle and handle all of my roles and responsibilities well,” she said. 

Someday she’ll leave the bar shifts and the sidelines behind, but she’ll always know she built herself here. In the late nights, early mornings, and everything in between.