Stories like this worry me -- especially as I look out at my classroom and see one cheerleader with two knee braces (she had knee surgery last year) and a cervical collar following a landing on her neck that put her in the hospital.

For decades, they stood by safe and smiling, a fixture on AmericaÂ’s sporting sidelines. But todayÂ’s young cheerleaders, who perform tricks once reserved for trapeze artists, may be in more peril than any female athletes in the country.

Emergency room visits for cheerleading injuries nationwide have more than doubled since the early 1990s, far outpacing the growth in the number of cheerleaders, and the rate of life-threatening injuries has startled researchers. Of 104 catastrophic injuries sustained by female high school and college athletes from 1982 to 2005 — head and spinal trauma that occasionally led to death — more than half resulted from cheerleading, according to the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research. All sports combined did not surpass cheerleading.

New acrobatic maneuvers have turned cheerleaders into daredevils. And while the sport has retained its sense of glamour, at dozens of competitions around the country, knee braces and ice bags affixed to ankles and wrists have become accouterments as common as mascara.

With more than four million participants cheering at everything from local youth football games to the N.C.A.A. menÂ’s basketball tournament, female cheerleaders now commonly do tricks atop pyramids or are tossed 20 feet in the air to perform twists and flips. If all goes well, the airborne cheerleader, known as the flier, is caught by other cheerleaders. But not always.

Are there not some reasonable limits to be placed on some of these stunts -- especially for younger girls?

Posted by: Greg at 02:40 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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