Bring It On meets ER ... the 411 on the most dangerous sport in women's athletics

Pompoms, Pyramids and Peril - New York Times:
"Emergency room visits for cheerleading injuries nationwide have more than doubled since the early 1990s, 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."

I was a bit surprised to read of the level of injuries in high school and college cheerleading until it occurred to me that there would be very few ER visits for sports women traditionally engage in compared to men's sports like football, basketball and wrestling.

The article points out that concerns about excessive injury claims led many schools to drop gymnastics and many gymnasts then turned to cheerleading and ratcheted up the physical challenges of that endeavor and it brought in more men who, being larger and stronger made higher pyramids and higher tosses possible.

If you haven't been paying attention to this trend, take a look at the film Bring It On or one of its sequels.

There is no denying that cheerleading nowadays bears little resemblance to what it was in my student days. When I was in high school in northern Virginia in the mid-50s, I attended most of our football and basketball games and only knew of one male cheerleader, a lone guy on the Yorktown High School squad. Cheerleading was more about loud yelling than gymnastics in those days. I even tried out for the cheerleading squad at UVa about thirty years ago when it was a nearly all-male school and we had no women cheerleaders - I didn't make it.

It is curious that while cheerleading was becoming more an athletic activity rather than an artistic perfomance at the student level, in pro sports they now have dancers rather than cheerleaders and a lot of these young women are very serious about dance. One of my cousins was a dancer for pro sports teams but is now back in university studying dance.