Football and Cheerleading Risks

High-school football players and cheerleaders are working hard, looking forward to fantastic seasons. No one wants to spoil the enthusiasm, but there are some sobering matters to consider.

Risk is inherent in sports based on collisions or pyramids high in the sky, but parents, coaches and staff members can make sure everything is in place to keep their young athletes as safe as possible.

Cheerleading is the leading cause of catastrophic injuries to young female athletes, reports The National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research, which is based at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. “Catastrophic” means fatal or resulting in a lifelong disability because the predominant injuries involve the head or spine.
 

Dr. Amy Miller Bohn, a physician at the University of Michigan Health System Department of Family Medicine, says that the Consumer Product Safety Commission has collected data that shows the number of injuries in cheerleading has risen from 5,000 in 1980 to nearly 28,000 in recent years.

“If you look at cheerleading injuries, most of them are still more the common types of things that we should think about—muscle strains or pulls, ligament injuries, tendon injuries,” Dr. Miller Bohn says. “The concern is that there are certainly a fair number of increasingly severe injuries.”

Participation in cheerleading has increased, but the sport has become much more demanding in the last 25 years. Cheerleaders need to be more acrobatic, be skilled in difficult maneuvers and be daring enough for spectacular stunts. When the moves go wrong, cheerleaders suffer.

Cheerleaders and their parents need to ask about a coach’s qualifications and experience with stunts and the plans for the squad—from when and where practice will be held to who will be spotting the cheerleaders as they learn and practice routines.

It’s also the time for football parents to check into that program, seeking the same of the coaches: credentials, experience and plans for the season.

A study shows that injuries boys suffer at the beginning or the middle of a football game are the most severe, pointing to the relationship between changes of game intensity and the risk of injury. The results of the study, by researchers at the Center for Injury Research and Policy in the Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, was published in Research in Sports Medicine.

"During kickoff and punting, a greater proportion of severe injuries occurred compared to all other phases of play," says Dawn Comstock, Ph.D., one of the study's authors.

This was the first study of its kind, linking the time in the game with the risks. It concludes by noting that discovering these links is the first step to keeping the millions of high-school players safe.

 

Anyone who doesn’t like football or cheerleading can see these studies as excellent reasons to stop offering the sports. But really they are reminders that youth does not carry immunity to injury. These are compelling reasons to be aware of that and take precautions.