Cheerleading dangerous? No kidding

No one understands how dangerous cheerleading is like those who actually wear the skirts, do the flips or scale the pyramids.

"It's a whole new thing now," said Julie Nye, an assistant cheer coach at Jordan High, who was a cheerleader herself in high school and college just a few years ago. "It's definitely a sport now. Each year they add more and more. You have to be bigger and better, and sometimes riskier. It's definitely at a whole new level."

So most local cheerleading coaches were not surprised when a recently released national study revealed that cheerleading accounted for two-thirds of sports-related deaths or serious injuries to high school girls in the past 25 years.

Just last year, two out of every 100,000 high school athletes suffered catastrophic injuries while cheerleading. In football, that rate was 3.2 athletes out of every 100,000.

Between 1982 and 2007, the report by Frederick Mueller, director of the University of North Carolina's National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research, showed 103 female athletes suffered catastrophic injuries or death playing sports and of that number 67 were cheerleaders.

Part of the explanation given is that in that same time frame, cheerleading evolved from leading chants and waving pom-poms to doing stunts and tumbling that require a high level of gymnastics training.

"That's one of the funnest things in cheer, is stunting and tumbling," said Gina Romney, cheerleading coach at Lehi High. "But I am very, very strict about safety protocol."

Stunting also allows cheerleaders to compete in regional and national competitions that put them center stage instead of in their traditionally supportive role on the sidelines of football games or the corner of the gymnasium.

The problem is that there is very little regulation and no enforcement, leaving it up to individual coaches to seek the training they may need to coach the cheer squad. Each coach also institutes his or her own safety requirements for squads, which leads to different requirements and restrictions from school to school.

"There are no requirements for coaches to get certain certifications," said Trish Andersen, the coach of Carbon High's cheerleading squad. "We've taken it upon ourselves to get every safety certification available, but it's not required."

In Utah, high school cheerleading coaches are required to go to risk management training because the Utah High School Activities Association covers cheerleading under its catastrophic insurance policy. That training, the coaches say, is not enough. One pointed out it doesn't even include CPR training.