In high school and college, cheerleading is by far the most perilous sport for female athletes, accounting for as much as two-thirds of severe school sports injuries over the past 25 years, according to a new report. Nevertheless, cheerleading remains one of the least-regulated sports, despite more than 95,000 high school girls and 2,000 boys signing-up for spirit squads nationwide each year.

According to Time magazine, “new data from the University of North Carolina’s National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research Institute (NCCSI) catalogs 67 fatal or life-threatening injuries due to cheerleading since 1982. By contrast, there were nine catastrophic injuries in gymnastics, the sport second most prone to such incidents. Indeed, cheerleaders suffered more injuries than all other school athletes combined – about 65% of severe injuries on the high school level and 67% on the college level. These findings confirm what many in the sport have worried about for years: as cheerleading has grown more competitive, athletes are willing to take greater risks. And because thee are no established regulations for reporting cheerleading injuries, ‘there are definitely more accidents out there that we haven’t heard about yet,’ says the study’s lead author Fred Mueller.

Due to high liability costs, schools eliminated gymnastics teams since the 1980s’, but cheerleaders have been incorporating more high-flying acrobatics. At younger ages than ever, girls start cheerleading, and parents have proven willing to pay thousands of dollars for their daughters to participate on elite touring squads that compete year-round.

To read the entire article from Time Magazine, link here:

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