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Writer's pictureSarah Witherspoon

Pyramid of Broken Bones: Handling Injuries in All-Star Cheerleading

When someone thinks of cheerleading, they’re going to think of girls standing on the sidelines at football or basketball games, shaking their pom-poms and yelling chants with big smiles on their face.


The rapid growing sport has evolved into a combination of dancing, gymnastics level tumbling, and crazy stunts that involve throwing people into the air.


Thanks to Netflix’s Cheer, the sport has grown in popularity and more have become interested in seeing what happens with cheerleading. While the Netflix series only shows a fraction of what actually happens with competitive cheer, it opens eyes to many about what these athletes are actually putting their bodies through.


Typically, cheerleading will have a lot of stunting. A stunt consists of usually four people: a top person (flyer) that is supported above the performance floor by one or more people, commonly known as the backspot and the bases. Stunts can be as basic as a thigh stand, where the flyer is standing on the bases’ thighs, to even more dynamic such as basket tosses where the flyer is tossed feet in the air, performs a skill and then is *hopefully* caught by their bases. Stunts also include pyramids which is the connection of various stunts happening at one time, both being basic and dynamic in its difficulty.


Credit : Instagram


Athletes start from a young age, some as young as two years old. The younger they are, the higher the risk of a moderate or severe injury occurring. Cheerleaders “younger than 12 are more susceptible to upper extremity fractures and dislocations than are their older counterparts.” These athletes are still growing, developing physically and mentally, this weaker bone structure and cognitive maturity usually leads to the younger athletes not really thinking before they perform a skill because they aren’t aware of all of the risks that are involved in performing said skill.


Surprisingly, many still don’t consider cheerleading a sport, even after seeing the daredevil level of stunts and tumbling these athletes are performing; So much so that the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) doesn’t recognize cheerleading as a sport, but more of a club-based organization. The NCAA does however, recognize a different form of competitive cheerleading called STUNT as a sport.



It could be due to the fact that people don’t really understand the intricacies that are involved in cheerleading like they would with sports like football or baseball, even healthcare providers. An athlete could come in with an injury from cheer practice, and sometimes doctors will treat it as if it was something else depending on the level of severity.


When we compare the injuries to those that you see in football, baseball, basketball, the overall number of injuries occurring within competitive cheerleading is low. The severity however, is a significantly larger number. According to various research studies, the number of catastrophic injuries happening within cheerleading grows greater every single year. The more complex and difficult the sport becomes, the more susceptible to injuries these athletes are.


According to a study done by Amy L Xu, Jennifer Beck, and R. Jay Lee, “Understanding the Cheerleader as an Orthopaedic Patient: An Evidence-Based Review of the Literature”, says a “mean of 3.6 catastrophic injuries per year were reported for cheerleading between 2002 and 2017, increasing from 1.95 injuries per year between 1982 and 2002.”


Most Common Injuries


Injuries in cheerleading occur all over the body. Shoulders, ankles, wrists, head, and neck are the most commonly injured areas. While sprains are the most common thing an athlete will probably experience in the sport, there are other serious or catastrophic injuries to look out for. This includes:


Concussions

Becoming increasingly more common in cheerleading, a concussion occurs when a flyer is dropped to the floor and they happen to hit their head against the floor or someone misses their feet in a tumbling pass and end up landing on their head and neck. Bases are at a huge risk of getting concussions because they’re holding a person above them.


Concussions carry a variety of lasting effects, some that can even be long-lasting. The number one injury coaches have been trained on especially in the last couple of years are concussions.


The USASF and USA Cheer provide links to concussion safety training that coaches are required to take in order to be certified. Athletes are also encouraged to watch concussion training videos so they know the warning signs for themselves and can look out for their teammates in the case they might suspect they have a concussion.


Neck Injuries

Cheerleaders more than anyone are at a higher risk than any athlete for neck fractures. This usually happens when an athlete is thrown in the air and not caught, or they happen to injure themselves while tumbling and land funny.


Ankle Injuries

This could be anywhere from a sprain to a fracture. Cheerleading involves a lot of running, jumping, and flipping and this can put a lot of strain on the athletes’ ankles.


These are probably the most common injuries you’ll see in cheerleading, especially within younger kids as they’re still growing and their bones are still developing, so their bodies are more prone to getting injured. In terms of healing, a typical ankle sprain can take up to 6 weeks. But in cases of a more serious injury, it could be a season-ending injury that could take months to rehab.


Knee Injuries

You usually will see injuries within the knee occur in sports such as football or soccer, but surprisingly, knee injuries happen a lot in competitive cheerleading as well. Again, athletes are jumping up and down, tumbling and flipping their bodies all over the place. One wrong move or one weird landing could ruin your knee, tearing ligaments such as your ACL and MCL or even your meniscus.


Healing takes a while, can anywhere from weeks to months. This again can be a season-ending injury if surgery is required. Knee injuries are harder to bounce back from as you have to build the strength back in those muscles before you even think about throwing a back handspring.


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Prevention is easy. All it takes is proper training. In some cases, coaches don’t receive the proper training when it comes to looking out for injuries and how to avoid them. They have the basic medical information that they’ll learn within their training videos, but that’s even if you watch the training videos; It’s best to watch the videos in their entirety to ensure you know how to treat an athlete in the event they get injured.


As mentioned prior, cheerleading isn’t even recognized as a sport, which adds to the problem in injury prevention. Without the proper oversight, these coaches and even people running competitions aren’t held to the same training and safety standards that someone in NCAA gymnastics are held to, for example.


The purpose of this series is to help improve understanding around injuries in cheerleading, specifically all-star cheerleading. It’s to present research, facts and information on how to approach the injury as an athlete, as a coach, and how prevention can easily happen.


I’m hoping to ease the minds of some parents and even grandparents that bite their nails nervously as their child is flipping their body all over the place or their kid is high in the air.


If we’re to proactively approach education and training and getting everyone involved, this will greatly help minimize the number of injuries that occur within a gym and will make the reporting process easier should an injury actually occur.


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