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Riskiest sport? Cheerleading, report finds

Sport accounts
for two-thirds of major injuries among female athletes

By Alex Johnson

Reporter MSNBC

updated
6:18 p.m. ET, Thurs., Aug. 21, 2008

Gymnasts
sometimes fall off the beam. Basketball players often crash to the court.
Softball players have unfortunate meetings of face and pitched ball. But when
young women turn out for high school and college sports, odds are it’s
the cheerleaders who are most at risk, new research shows.

Cheerleading,
in fact, is far more dangerous than any other women’s sport, accounting
for 65 percent of all catastrophic injuries in high school girls’
athletics and 67 percent in colleges. Those figures emerged in a 25-year
study published this month by the National
Center for Catastrophic Sports
Injury Research at the University
of North Carolina.

The next most
dangerous sports, gymnastics and track, were far behind, causing 9 percent
and 7 percent of all catastrophic injuries, respectively, since 1982.

The raw numbers
are not particularly large — the study looked only at injuries that
caused death, permanent disability or serious long-term impairment. But other
research by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has found that the
number of cheerleaders taken to emergency rooms has increased by more than
600 percent since the early 1980s, reaching nearly 25,000 visits a year.

High school athletic authorities in many states have recognized
competitive cheerleading as a varsity sport, helping to create an industry of
private camps and tournaments where teams show off gymnastics-style routines
that send young women flying through the air and plunging off of human
pyramids three levels high.

It was that
sort of routine that left Patty Phommanyvong, 17,
of John Marshall
High School in Los Angeles, a comatose quadriplegic after
she fell to the ground while performing at a football game last October.

“They
threw her up in the air. When she came down, she was hurt,” said
Patty’s mother, Vilay Phommanyvong.

Dr. Bruce Fagel, a physician and lawyer representing the family,
said Patty was hit in the chest when she was tossed into the air.

“The
information we have is she went limp when she was caught,” Fagel said.

The year
before, Jessica Smith, then 18, fractured her neck and back when she crashed
to the ground during cheerleading practice at Sacramento
City College
in California.
Smith said her squad was practicing a new stunt in which she was tossed high
into the air, but fellow team members did not catch her.

Most recently,
Lauren Chang, 20, died in April when she was kicked in the chest during a
cheerleading competition in Worcester,
Mass.

“Lauren
died doing what she loved, cheerleading and being with her friends,”
Chang’s sister, Nancy, said in a statement. “We hope her death will
shed light on the inherent risks of cheerleading, and we hope that additional
safeguards are taken to insulate against those risks.”

Training, facilities can’t keep up

Frederick Mueller, who
compiled the injury study, said there were several reasons so many girls and
young women were getting hurt.

For one thing,
the number of young women joining cheerleading squads in recent years has
increased dramatically as cheerleading has become a sport.

But
cheerleaders still make up only about 3 percent of the nation’s 2.9
million female high school athletes, according to figures compiled by the
National Federation of State High School Associations. By contrast, they
sustained 65.1 percent of the catastrophic injuries among those athletes,
Mueller said.

No
comprehensive statistics on the number of college cheerleaders are available
because the National Collegiate Athletic Association does not recognize
cheerleading as a sport.

Still, the
study cited figures from the NCAA’s insurance program, which reported
that 25 percent of claims involving college athletics resulted from
cheerleading injuries. Cheerleading was a close second only to football, even though the insurance program estimated that
football players outnumbered cheerleaders by a ratio of more than 8 to 1.

Mueller, a
professor of exercise and sports science at the University of North
Carolina, said that as cheerleading routines
become ever more spectacular — and spectacularly risky — support
for cheerleaders is not keeping up.

He cited a 2006
report published in the journal Pediatrics, which found that many coaches
were not certified and that many schools lacked proper facilities and
equipment. Some cheerleaders were still practicing in hallways and on other
hard surfaces, it said.

“A major
factor in this increase has been the change in cheerleading activity, which
now involves gymnastic-type stunts,” Mueller said. “If these
cheerleading activities are not taught by a competent coach and keep
increasing in difficulty, catastrophic injuries will continue to be a part of
cheerleading.”

Mueller’s
report called on state and collegiate officials to enact nearly a dozen
safeguards, including a qualification system that would require a cheerleader
to demonstrate mastery of stunts before a new routine could be attempted. It
also called for banning any routine involving a mini-trampoline or falls off
of other cheerleaders’ shoulders.

“The
basic question that has to be asked is, ‘What is the role of the
cheerleader?’” the study said. “... Is cheerleading an activity
that leads the spectators in cheers or is it a sport?”

“If the
answer is to entertain the crowd and to be in competition with other
cheerleading squads, then there must be safety guidelines initiated”
fully as stringent as those for contact sports like football and wrestling,
it concluded.

© 2008 MSNBC Interactive