2 cheers for aerial X Games

What sport delivers bone-crushing hits and TKOs?

What sport sends thousands of kids to the emergency room each year?

What sport is becoming increasingly dangerous and ranks No. 1 in catastrophic injuries?

Football? Hockey?

No, cheerleading. Sis, boom, splat.

Why do they even call it cheerleading anymore? It's a high-flying circus act, Barnum & Bailey in skirts and pony tails. The days of cheerleaders actually serving as cheerleaders is pretty much over. Now they call it, well, a sport.

Nate Felt, an athletic trainer and former BYU cheerleader and adviser, says, "When people find out I was a cheerleader, they say, 'Give me a cheer.' We don't do cheers. I don't even know any. We do stunts."

Today it's less about the basketball and football games and more about preparing for cheerleading competitions, which are actually more about gymnastics than cheering.

The sport has morphed into an aerial X Games. Felt believes it changed for the same reason that football and basketball games began assaulting fans with loud music, electronic scoreboard gimmickry, fan contests, fireworks, sirens and spandex-wrapped dancing girls — all apparently in the belief that fans have a raging collective case of Attention Deficit Disorder. The game is no longer considered to be enough entertainment. Ditto for girls leading cheers.

"You hardly see cheerleaders doing cheers anymore," says Felt.

Instead, it has evolved into a gymnastics gala, without mats and often without spotters. It's a sideshow of somersaults, flips, back handsprings, pyramids and "basket tosses," with only the grass or an oak floor to catch them if they make a mistake. Cheerleaders are hurled 20 feet into the air and (usually) caught by teammates forming a human trampoline. Or they fall from the top of a pyramid into waiting arms.

Doesn't it just look like they're asking for trouble?

• Injuries for high school and college cheerleaders have more than doubled since the early 1990s.

• A recent study by the Columbus Children's Research Institute reported that the number of cheerleader-related injuries treated in the emergency room from 1990 to 2002 more than doubled (from 12,000 to more than 28,000), while participation in the sport had increased only 18 percent. This doesn't even count those who took their injuries to team doctors, trainers or personal doctors.