Cheerleading
injuries spur debate over stunts

Saturday,
March 04, 2006

By Jake
Lloyd

[email-masked]
-- 789-1250

Cheerleading has become more than
pom-poms and yells. It can be dangerous. The statistics say so.

Since August, when a 14-year-old
girl died in Massachusetts while performing a stunt, there has been an
increase in dialogue locally and across the country about the perils of both
sideline cheerleading at games and competitive cheerleading.

The Cascades Conference, made up of
eight area teams, was concerned enough this past fall to rule that sideline
cheerleaders could not perform stunts during football and basketball games.
The rule was later modified to allow stunts at practice and during
non-conference football games.

"This year in cheer I've seen
more injuries than in any of the other sports I've competed in," said Manchester competitive
cheerleader Laura Eisenhauer, who once had a tooth
chipped by a teammate's errant elbow. "I think we get more because we're
up in the air and throwing people."

However, Michigan Center
High School competitive
cheer coach Jessica Trefry, whose team will be in
regional competition today, insists cheer is no different than other sports.

"(Injuries) just come with
sports in general," she said. "Now, it's thought of as this
terribly dangerous sport.

"If you take proper
precautions and go from the basics and move on and take it step by step, and
don't take the girls beyond their limits, I think it can be extremely
safe."

One of Trefry's
cheerleaders, senior Kristin Pollard, sustained a concussion last year during
practice but said it didn't really affect her outlook on the sport.

"All I had was a really bad
headache," Pollard said. "It didn't really scare me because I don't
remember it."

The journal Pediatrics reported in
January that cheerleading-related injuries have more than doubled during the
past 13 years, despite the number of participants increasing by just 18
percent. Nearly 209,000 people ages 5-18 were treated at U.S. hospitals for injuries
sustained from cheerleading between 1990 and 2002.

According to the National Center
for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research, "no other sport comes within
shouting distance of cheerleading in terms of major injuries, such as spinal
and head trauma. ! Of the 101 catastrophic injuries
sustained by female high school and college athletes between 1982 and 2004,
55 percent resulted from cheerleading -- more than every other sport
combined."

Last year, the NCAA's
Catastrophic Injury Insurance Program reported that 25 percent of its claims
for college athletes since 1998 have been the result of cheerleading.
Cheerleading trailed only football based on that percentage, and nationally
there are about 100 football players for every 12 cheerleaders.

Napoleon cheerleading coach Debbie
Baxter said most injuries sustained by her squad are minor ankle and wrist
sprains. Trefry said the most serious injury during
her five years as coach was an ankle sprain when a girl tripped coming off
the mat.

But Eisenhauer
said an inexperienced flyer on her team broke her arm this season.

"I think it's just like every
other sport where there's always a chance that you can get hurt," she
said, "but girls don't go out on the floor thinking they're going to get
hurt."

According to Pollard, "It's no
different (than other sports). We don't do anything that we're not capable of
being safe (with). If people get hurt it's because we're trying something to
the extreme. We don't try anything not within our own boundaries."

Trefry said cheerleading in Michigan is safer than
it is elsewhere because the Michigan High School Athletic Association has put
together a rulebook for competition that bars some stunts that are allowed
elsewhere.

Kathy Westdorp
Vruggink, the MHSAA's
assistant communications director who handles competitive cheer, said the
state has specific spotting techniques for each stunt.

"If the spotting is not
adhered to, seven points are deducted from the total points earned in the
round each time the infraction occurs," she said.

Stunts and/or pyramids are limited
to two persons high, meaning the flyer receives primary support from a base who is in direct, weight-bearing contact with the mat.

One Cascades Conference athletic
director, Pat Richardson of Grass
Lake, said the
restrictions on cheerleading -- made primarily by the schools'
superintendents -- had a lot to do with separating competitive cheer from
sideline cheer.

"Sideline cheer is not
recognized as an MHSAA sport," Richardson
said. "That's my understanding of the rationale for not stunting during
a sideline event, because they are just two totally different things."

Baxter and Trefry
say the decision went too far.

"I find it unfair -- there's
no doubt about that -- that they've taken this step," Baxter said.

Her explanation for all the hype?

"There's already a
preconceived idea that we're girls and not athletes," she said, "so
people view those injuries as a little bit more severe."