A Sport TV reporter just mentioned 6 Cheer deaths in the USA since 1982.
Is that true?
I would not be surprised.
… A recent study found that cheerleading injuries more than doubled between 1990 and 2002. Over that period, 200,000 youthful cheerleaders had to be treated in hospital. Most were minor cases, but more than 50 involved “catastrophic injury”. …
Out of America: Cheerleading has become a matter of life and death
Leave a comment if you have links to statistical research.
1 comment so far ↓
Interesting that there’s “only” been six. I was a cheerleader on one of the squads that experienced a death (near Houston, TX 1991) at the jr high level and wonder if they are counting Jr High, too. What’s unfortunate is that there was an awful lot of negative press regarding cheering after this particular accident, and it was truly a freak accident. The girl who died was simply climbing onto the shoulders of another girl to SIT on her shoulders–a most basic cheer stunt that kids do horsing around to varying degrees all the time. Falling 3-4 feet generally wouldn’t kill you, but if you hit your head just so, it does. Still, the press was unfortunate in suggesting that we should have had mats and probably woudn’t have been satisfied until we were doing shoulder sits in football helmets. Bottom line: a freak accident like that can happen in ANY sport, to blame cheerleading in this particular case is to look for the easy way out of the blame game.
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