Thread: Pompoms, Pyramids and Peril

For decades, they stood by safe and smiling, a fixture on America’s sporting sidelines. But today’s young cheerleaders, who perform tricks once reserved for trapeze artists, may be in more peril than any female athletes in the country.

Emergency room visits for cheerleading injuries nationwide have more than doubled since the early 1990s, and the rate of life-threatening injuries has startled researchers. Of 104 catastrophic injuries sustained by female high school and college athletes from 1982 to 2005 — head and spinal trauma that occasionally led to death — more than half resulted from cheerleading, according to the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research. All sports combined did not surpass cheerleading.

More at: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/30/sports/31cnd-cheerleader.html?ei=5090&en=c58443d649cbfe6a&ex=13 32907200&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=pr int

You will have head and spinal trauma when these little obnoxious cheerleaders try to throw someone up in the air and catch them.
They aren't strong enough.
All the kings horses and all the kings men can't put Bambi together again.

Yeah, it does look pretty dangerous.