The availability of safety education programs has expanded greatly. USA Cheer makes available a risk management course that covers all facets of safety and well-being of the athlete as well as a recommended return to play RTP protocol. There is an abundance of information available today about sports-related injuries and return-to-play, yet there is still much more knowledge to gain on the subject.
Research is being updated daily to accommodate for new cases, advancements in technology, and parameter changes within cheerleading. Educating professionals is of the utmost importance to protect the life and sports career of the athlete. Moreover, healthcare professionals should be available to cheerleaders, just like any other athletes. We support the ideals of early access to appropriate care and early diagnosis of injury to ensure the best outcomes for our athletes.
The bulk of research that is out there discusses whether or not cheerleading is safe as well as how many injuries occur per year. This is important to consider since cheerleading has gone from leading "yells" at games to a performance sport that often includes tumbling and stunts.
This is by far the most talked about and perhaps most important area of cheerleading statistics today. To date, there are no exact figures on how many cheerleaders have died while cheerleading. That's because statistics are instead categorized by "serious injuries" that lead to death or life altering complications.
However, there have been more than a few highlighted in the news. When Lauren Chang died during an April competition in , her family was spurred to activism working with legislators to make safety rules for cheerleading. Although there is an inherent risk in all sports, no one expects to die as a direct result of cheerleading. Such deaths tend to draw attention to all of those girls flying through the air doing stunts.
Undoubtedly, this highlights the need for better and more thorough safety standards. Common safety procedures should include:. Many cheerleaders point out that they don't have time to drag mats during the half time of a game, and so the requirement for mats on the floor limits what the squad can perform. However, if they knew what could lay ahead for them, they might think again about performing those types of stunts without proper safety precautions.
While there is no doubt that cheerleading carries an inherent risk, as do all sports, you also need to be careful when reading cheerleading statistics. As any statistician will tell you, it is easy to make numbers tell a small part of the story by giving only a piece of the information. When you're reading statistics on cheerleading, it's important to have the complete picture. There are several statements about the safety of cheerleading that have been made recently.
Headlines rang with the shocking story that cheerleading is more dangerous than football citing the statistic that some 28, cheerleaders made trips to the emergency room in To compound the serious injury factor, there were at least four serious incidents in the news relatively recently:.
While these injuries and others certainly warrant a look at safety standards in cheerleading, to say that cheerleading is more dangerous than football is not quite accurate.
Cheerleading is generally a year round sport, while football is just one season. She referred me to a paper published in the American Journal of Sports Medicine. The paper, based on High School RIO data, looked at concussions among high school athletes — where they occurred in practice or competition and in what sport — as well as participation rates during the school years.
The finding? Here are the competition concussion rates per , athlete exposures: 5. Cheerleading falls in the middle of the pack. But when we factor in concussions accumulated in practice, we see something interesting. In every sport except cheerleading, the rate drops steeply — concussions in practice happen about one-sixth as often as concussions in competition.
Cheerleading was the only sport of the 20 surveyed that had a higher risk of concussion in practice 14 per , than in competition 12 per , In competition, however, the students are likely to be on proper mats and therefore less likely to be at risk for getting a concussion.
The reports from the catastrophic injury study at UNC seem to back this up; a high number of the injuries seem to occur both during practice and also as a result of contact with a hard surface. What does that mean? Official sport status means that money, equipment and resources come from schools, not necessarily from the cheerleaders themselves or alternative sources. Yes, catastrophic injuries happen, as do concussions.
But keeping in mind that a lot of kids are cheerleading — and that every day we may take risks that have even grimmer statistics — we can get a better picture of the actual risks involved.
This report, written by Frederick O.
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