Ankur Dholakia
/ The Detroit
News

The Allen
Park cheer team competes at state finals. Injuries
are hard to avoid in the risky sport, and the Allen Park squad has lost a girl each of
the last two years to a torn anterior cruciate knee
ligament.  This year, one of the
team members broke her hand.

It's not your mother's
cheerleading

A sanctioned varsity sport in Mich. since 1994,
cheering involves year-round training to nail risky, complex routines.

Thursday, March 09,
2006

Angelique S. Chengelis
/ The Detroit
News

Ankur Dholakia
/ The Detroit
News

"Anybody who
doesn't believe that it is a sport should come to a practice and practice
with us and try to do everything," says a cheerleader at Bedford High,
performing at the State Cheerleading Finals.

They
gathered off to the corner just a few feet from their performance platform
and engaged in a noisy, organized pre-competition huddle.

It is a
scene mirrored in many sports, as teams psych themselves to prepare for the
field or the court.

This,
however, was the Allen Park competitive cheer team, a group of athletic, precision-oriented
girls who train five to six days a week, three hours at a time, as they learn
highly choreographed gymnastic-like routines that are all about in-sync
execution.

Clearly,
this is not your mother's pompom, rah-rah cheerleading, ponytails and pleated
skirts aside.

Competitive
cheer has been a sanctioned varsity sport in Michigan -- one of only a handful of
states that endorse it -- since 1994.

"I
educate my girls to be athletes," said Julie Goodwin, who in her fifth
year as Allen Park's coach is taking them to a
fifth straight state final this weekend at Grand Rapids. "They're not allowed to
cry. There is no crying. You come on the floor like an athlete; you
leave the floor like an athlete."

Said
Goodwin: "I really preach that they're athletes and the seriousness of
the sport. You see kids walking in waving at their parents in the stands -- I
said to the team, 'Do you see the football players walking in waving to their
moms and dads? No. They're focused on what they need to do, and that's what you
" guys have to do.'

Competitive
cheerleaders want you to be absolutely certain of one thing -- they are
athletes. And that means they are worthy of varsity letters, and they are
worthy of the Michigan High School Athletic Association endorsement.

Ankur Dholakia
/ The Detroit
News

Sarah Bubb, head coach of the Berkley Bears cheer team, leads
her squad from the sidelines at the state finals at Ladywood
High School in Livonia.

Teams fight stereotype

Still, the
girls said they must challenge the cheerleading stereotype every day.

"People
think it's just like you smile, and you jump up and down," said Allen Park senior
Chelsea Guilder, who has been in organized cheer since she was 7. "When
they make fun of it, I do get really defensive because it's not like that at
all. It's tumbling, and everything has to be perfect, everything has to be
on. You have to see it to believe it."

While some
of the girls do participate in non-sanctioned sideline cheering during the
fall, competitive cheer involves nearly year-around training, and the precise
execution of, say, synchronized swimming with an element of danger as the
girls flip, spin and jump.

"Anybody
who doesn't believe that it is a sport should come to a practice and practice
with us and try to do everything," said Margeaux
Leighton, a junior from Bedford.
"It takes skill. It's tough."

Colette
Norscia was a cheerleader in Michigan
before the sport was sanctioned. Now she is in her seventh year coaching at
Southgate Anderson, which is making its fourth straight appearance in the
state championships this weekend.

There is
no crossover of her athletes, so they all concentrate on competitive cheer
and are not available for sideline cheering.

Her
program has come a long way since she arrived.

"We
were practicing in the cafeteria," Norscia said. "I fought really
hard to get the same facility use" as other sports.

Norscia
also has the benefit of coaching with a gymnastics instructor, Elizabeth Kernan. By completely separating competitive cheer from
sideline cheering in 1999, Norscia said the team has a clear-cut advantage
because of the amount of attention they can place on gymnastics.

"When
I was in cheerleading, it wasn't the same as it is now," Norscia said.
"It was a dance format. By no means was it as athletic as it is now.

"It
has really evolved the last five years as a sport because the gymnastics has
really changed it. Now the girls get to focus on the athletic part of
it."

Injuries are on the rise

The
training is similar to that in any other sport. The cheerleaders run, they
weight train, and they go through high-intensity jumping drills.

And like
any other sport, there are considerable physical risks.

Further
proof that competitive cheer is a far cry from its rah-rah, pompom heritage
comes from a study published earlier this year in the medical journal,
Pediatrics.

The study
found that cheerleading-related injuries among 5- to 18-year-olds more than
doubled between 1990 and 2002. An estimated 208,800 in that age group were
treated in hospitals.

Most of
the injuries were suffered by cheerleaders ages 12-17 and about 40 percent of
the injuries were to the lower extremities -- leg, ankle and foot. Most of
the injured cheerleaders were girls.

About half
of the injuries were sprains and strains, 18 percent were soft-tissue
injuries like bruising, and 16 percent were fractures and dislocations.
Concussions accounted for 3 percent.

Because
cheerleading is a certified varsity sport, competitive cheer coaches in Michigan are required
to take safety courses each year.

But
cheerleading is gaining a reputation around the country as one of the more
dangerous sports because of injury studies.

The most
recent report by the National
Center for Catastrophic
Sports Injury said catastrophic injuries to female athletes have been on the
rise in the past 25 years.

Stunts increase risk

During the
1982-83 school year, there was one female
catastrophic injury, but during the last 22 years there has been an average
of 6.7 per year.

According
to the study, the major reason for the increase has been because of the
change in cheerleading, which is more athletic and gymnastic in nature,
involving complicated stunts.

High
school cheerleading accounted for half of all high school direct catastrophic
injuries to female athletes and 64.5 percent at the college level. The
research indicated that of the 101 direct catastrophic injuries to high
school and college female athletes from 1982-83 through 2003-04, cheerleading
was related to 55 of them.

Last year,
there was a highly publicized cheerleading-related death in Massachusetts. Ashley Burns, 14, died
shortly after she had landed on her chest after being thrown in the air
during a practice routine.

Southern
Illinois University cheerleader Kristi Yamaoka lost her balance during a
cheer routine at a basketball game last Sunday and fell about 15 feet onto
her head. She had a concussion and chipped neck vertebra.

Michigan's high
school competitive cheer coaches believe that with constant supervised
instruction, injuries are kept to a minimum. But like any sport, injuries are
hard to avoid.

The Allen Park team, for
instance, has lost a girl each of the last two years to a torn anterior cruciate knee ligament. This year, one of the team
members broke her hand.

"By
this time of the season, everyone is hurting," Goodwin said. "Just
like football, when you get to the end of the season, everyone is hurting,
but you've got to get past that. It's about stamina. That's why we condition
all year around."

Bedford junior cheerleader Margeaux Leighton said she tries not to think about the
potential for injuries.

"It's
always in the back of our minds, but we don't think about how much it happens
but how much it doesn't happen," Leighton said. "We work on
preventing it from happening and perfecting our skills with the right
technique so we prevent injuries."

Those who
coach competitive cheer and those who participate in competitive cheer argue
they train and practice as hard as, if not harder, than peers in other more
traditional sports.

Eventually,
they said, everyone will figure that out.

"We
usually practice in a different area, and (last) week we practiced at the
high school," Goodwin said. "And the basketball coach and the
wrestling coach were all like, 'Oh, my God, I had no idea what these girls
do.' Now they're all impressed at what we're doing.

"When they hear
cheerleading, whether it's competitive or sideline, they just think we cheer
at the football games and that's all we do. They've definitely been
enlightened. This sport has come a long way."