Cheerleaders’
safety top priority

Dean Holzwarth | The Grand Rapids Press, March 1, 2009

GRAND RAPIDS -- As a four-year competitive
cheerleader, East Kentwood senior Kierya Wilson has been
thrown into the air nearly 20 feet in a basket toss.

She
also has been a back spot, responsible for catching a flier when she comes
down. So Wilson has a unique perspective of the
dangers that go along with competitive cheer.

"When
you're a flier, there's always the possibility of accidents happening, but
I've been lucky enough as a flier to never have been dropped," Wilson said. "It is a dangerous
sport, and you can easily get hurt from stunting, but we take good
precautions whenever we stunt."

As
competitive cheer team members gather Saturday at the DeltaPlex for the state
high school finals, their sport has been shrouded nationally in some
controversy.

In a
closely watched case, the Wisconsin Supreme Court in January deemed cheer a
contact sport in response to an injured girl's lawsuit because a teammate
failed to spot her. And a few months earlier, experts released a study showing
cheerleading is the most dangerous sport for high school girls and college
women.

According
to an annual report released in August by the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury
Research, high school cheerleading accounted for 65.1 percent of all
catastrophic sports injuries among high school females the past 25 years. A
major factor in those numbers is there are more gymnastics-type stunts in
today's sport.

Between
1982 and 2007 there have been 103 fatal, disabling or serious injuries among
high school female athletes. Of those, 67 were in cheer. The next most
dangerous sports were gymnastics with nine and track and field with seven.

Almost
95,200 female students take part in high school cheerleading annually, along
with about 2,100 males.

However,
longtime Grandville coach Julie Smith-Boyd said Michigan's rules help keep the sport safe
here. The guidelines have been in place since cheerleading became an official
Michigan High School Athletic Association sport in 1994.

"A
lot of other states are governed by cheerleading programs and not under
athletics," Smith-Boyd said. "The MHSAA is involved in safety and
coaches' training. There are rules in place to make sure stunts are safe;
what stunts are allowed, what spotters have to do and when the flier can be
inverted."

Smith-Boyd
said safety has come a long way since she was a cheerleader in the 1970s.

"When
I was a cheerleader, we would practice in the hallways and we didn't have
mats," she said. "But schools are taking safety serious now and are
responsible for keeping kids safe."

East Kentwood coach Stacy Sheler has been
involved in competitive cheer as a coach and official for 18 years. She never
has seen any serious injuries in her program.

Sheler said when her team tries a new stunt,
safety is of the utmost importance.

"Everyone
has to stand around the flier so the flier never hits the ground," she
said. "The back spots get beat up with elbows in the eye and catching
girls and falling to the ground, but the spotters aren't falling from two
people up."

Spotting
was at issue in the Wisconsin court case, where the state Supreme Court ruled that
because cheerleading is a contact sport, its participants cannot be sued for
accidentally causing injuries.

The
ruling stemmed from a lawsuit brought on by Brittany Noffke,
now 18. While practicing a stunt in 2004 as a high school cheerleader, she
fell backward off the shoulder of a teammate and suffered a serious head
injury.

Besides
saying she could not sue the teammate who was supposed to spot her, the court
ruled Noffke cannot sue her district.

"If
that would've been my daughter, I would've been angry, but I wouldn't have
gone as far as suing," said Wilson, a flier for three years and a back
spot this season. "He didn't drop her on purpose, and they obviously had
done it before without her getting hurt."

Wilson knows from experience, however,
the anxiety of being a flier.

"It
can be very scary when you're tossed into the air like that, but it's all
about trusting your teammates," Wilson said.