Let me preface this article with the fact that my daughter takes cheerleading classes, not cheerleading like you see at high school events or even in the movie: Bring It On. Her cheerleading is more of the cute variety where she swings her arms, stomps her feet, says a quick cheer and maybe does a cartwheel or two.
Yet, a couple of months ago there was an article in the New York Times that stated cheerleading had become the most perilous of high school and collegiate sports. According to the article, female high school and collegiate athletes sustained 104 catastrophic injuries between 1982 and 2005. When they say catastrophic injury, they are referring to head and spinal trauma that occasionally resulted in death. Cheerleaders suffered over half of all these types of injury.
In 2002, cheerleaders were the source of nearly 30,000 emergency room visits. And that’s for just one year. The number of visits to the emergency room has nearly doubled since the early 90s. According to the article, one cheerleader at Sacramento City College broke her neck in two places after a bad cheerleading stunt landed her on her head from a height of 15 feet.
The article in the times quoted Smith when she said:
They make you sign a medical release when you join a cheerleading team. They ought to tell girls that they are signing a death warrant.
Too often we all think of cheerleading as just a bunch of hopping up and down with the pretty girls chanting their cheer and dancing a jig. We make fun of them. We make jokes about them. We even groan when our daughters mention they want to be them. But cheerleading is a highly competitive sport where the teams are being forced to reach farther, reach higher and do more dangerously spectacular things to make the cut.
Cheerleaders don’t wear protective gear. They do have spotters, but if you are in the middle of a throw and you stumble or you miss – the person in the air is the one likely to hit the ground with no way to protect themselves. Too often, we adopt a mentality that it’s okay to push past the pain for a sport – and don’t get me wrong, cheerleading is a sport – but we need to be less cavalier about a sport that can leave young girls paralyzed or dead – because of one misstep.
Did you realize that the number of injuries in cheerleading was climbing?
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