[Grovenet] The Most Dangerous Sport In School...

[Ron D'Eau Claire]

..and they don't even wear protective gear. 

Jessica Smith, an 18-year-old cheerleader at Sacramento City College, broke
her neck in two places five months ago when a botched stunt dropped her
headfirst from a height of about 15 feet.

She was the flier during a practice in October, when the team was attempting
a new maneuver that called for her to be thrown upside down into a
handstand, where she would be caught by a male cheerleader perched on two
other cheerleaders' thighs. After trying the stunt once, Smith said, she was
uncomfortable trying it again. She relented when coaxed by her teammates. 

"But as I was thrown in the air, the cheerleader who was supposed to catch
me lost his balance and fell back," Smith said. "I was inverted and in the
air with nothing to stop me from coming straight down on my head. I hit and
heard my neck crack. I was screaming after that."

Smith fractured two vertebrae.

She endured two months with a halo device bolted to her skull that held her
head and neck in place. Although her neck is healing and she has complete
use of her arms and legs, she has dropped out of school and her movements
remain highly restricted. She said she rarely sleeps at night, awakened by
recurring flashbacks of the accident.

"Still, I'm one of the lucky ones," she said. "Some people don't walk away
from a cheerleading fall."

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.

New acrobatic maneuvers have turned cheerleaders into daredevils. And while
the sport has retained its sense of glamour, at dozens of competitions
around the country, knee braces and ice bags affixed to ankles and wrists
have become accouterments as common as mascara.

Emergency room visits for cheerleading injuries nationwide have more than
doubled since the early 1990s, far outpacing the growth in the number of
cheerleaders, 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.

------------------

I have a number of friends who have worked in fields considered dangerous by
many and who, like myself, notice that the current generation of children
seem terribly handicapped by fears for their health and safety. Unlike us,
kids can't handle literally hundreds of chemicals for fear of injuring
themselves or the environment. They are protected from any possible
electrical shock so they grow up never knowing how to behave around
dangerous electrical appliances. Do high school shops even teach kids how to
weld or operate a machinist's lathe these days? (I still have a scar in my
finger from the day I got careless in that class.) 

Kids are told to stay away from guns, rather than learning how to handle
them safely and in the right circumstances. Most of them are isolated from
the gut-wrenching gore of slaughtering an animal. I understand they aren't
even required to dissect a frog in class any longer. It's too traumatic. 

I wonder how far one of those young cheerleaders would get riding her
bicycle down the street without a helmet or jumping into a car without
fastening a seat belt before some adult would complain? 

Are kids today any safer or are they simply more ignorant, denied life
experiences by fearful adults who fail to recognize the real dangers around
them, physical dangers such as Jessica Smith experienced and the much
greater real, awesome danger of ignorance? As a child in acrobatics class an
the local "Y" I flew like Jessica but only wearing a special belt that had
ropes attached and looped over pulleys on the ceiling to let me fly free -
unless I was in danger of landing like she did. And we worked over mats on
the floor. Adults in my world understood the dangers of falling from 15 feet
in the air. They were far more concerned about that than the remote
possibility of my falling off of my bicycle and striking my head. 

I wouldn't wish on any child today my experience as a grade schooler having
his neighbor friend engulfed in flaming liquid and then suffer for days a
slow, agonizing death after he stupidly tried to loosen the cap of a can of
paint remover using a blowtorch. Although I wasn't there when it happened,
Jimmy Andrade's experience was burned into my life as it ended his. Jimmy's
end came not because adults cared less then, nor were the flames the real
cause. Jimmy died of ignorance at a moment when no one was watching. Reading
about the cheerleaders I'm struck with the fact that they are doing these
stunts in the full view and approval of the adults who are supposed to
protect them. It's even become a popular spectator sport for TV shows! But
TV is filled with shows and advertisements encouraging people to do
outrageous, idiotic stunts. They even recognize their idiocy with statements
like "don't try this at home..." 

Are we raising our children enmeshed in a senseless web of rules and
restrictions that keep them more ignorant than safe?  

Full story:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/31/sports/31cheerleader.html?em&ex=1175572800
&en=e7583f2f1508c179&ei=5087%0A

Or

http://tinyurl.com/2qxmf3

Ron D'Eau Claire