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22 | Touchline issue 23 | April 2016
CHEERLEADING RANKED AS ONE OF MOST DANGEROUS TEAM SPORTS
What team sport is the most dangerous for girl athletes?
Perhaps you think it would be football, hockey, basketball,
or rugby? But for high school girls and college women,
cheerleading is far more dangerous than any other sport,
according to a report by the National Center for Catastrophic
Sports Injury Research in the US.
According to the report, high school cheerleading accounted
for 65.1 percent of all catastrophic sports injuries among high
school females over the past 25 years. The data doesn’t include
ankle sprains, but does tabulate fatal, disabling and serious
injuries.
The statistics are equally discouraging in college, where
cheerleading accounted for 66.7 percent of all female sports
catastrophic injuries, compared to the past estimate of 59.4
percent. The revised picture results from a new partnership
between the sports injury center and the National Cheer Safety
Foundation, a California-based not-for-profit body created to
promote safety in cheerleading and collect data on injuries. The
foundation provided the center with previously unreported data.
“A major factor in this increase has been the change in
cheerleading activity, which now involves gymnastic-type
stunts,” said Dr. Frederick O. Mueller, lead researcher on the
new report and a professor of exercise and sports science at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The report found that between 1982 and 2007, there were
103 fatal, disabling or serious injuries recorded among female
high school athletes, with the vast majority (67) occurring in
cheerleading. The next most dangerous sports: gymnastics (nine
such injuries) and track (seven).
Among college athletes, there have been 39 of these severe
injuries: 26 in cheerleading, followed by three in field hockey
and two each in lacrosse and gymnastics. The report also notes
that according to the NCAA Insurance program, 25 percent
of money spent on student athlete injuries resulted from
cheerleading.
According to the report, almost 95,200 female students take
part in high school cheerleading annually, along with about
2,150 males.