Tia+G.

[[image:Cheer_fall.jpg width="512" height="323" align="right" caption="cheer stunt gone wrong"]]
=**How many cheerleaders have to become injured to be taken seriously?**=

Original story from //The New York Times:// [|As Cheerleaders Soar Higher, So does the Danger]  I found this story very interesting because I am a cheerleader, so I know a lot of the dangers within cheerleading that a lot of people don’t realize. It was shocking to me how big of an issue cheerleading injures have become over the years. According to research done by the National Center for Catastrophic Sports all other sports combined don’t add up to the amount of injuries caused because of cheerleading. In the year 2002 there was 22,900 cheerleading injures! I myself am lucky enough that I have only sprained my wrist twice from cheerleading; this isn’t the case for most injures in the cheer world.

[|The National Center for Catastrophic Injuries] actually came to the conclusion that cheerleading is the most dangerous sport. This was determined statistically therefore making it less of an opinion and more factual.

This article was published in the //The New York Times// which happens to be a liberally biased newspaper. Although, there doesn’t appear to be any bias material in this particular article.

Many [|people] say that “cheerleading isn’t a //real// sport.” I feel this article proves all those people wrong. Cheerleaders are pushed to a whole new level at every practice they attend. Cheerleading didn’t always use to be this way. Cheerleading use to be preppy girls in bows yelling loudly and waving pompoms in the air, but the sport has evolved. [|80%] of the schools in the United States have a cheerleading squad. The writer is speaking on behalf of all the injured cheerleaders and their parents. The writer wants people to know about this growing problem. The result of this article is a well informed reader.

Here are two videos on the subject: a [|video] of a basket toss and a video of a [|full] (cheer stunts) gone wrong so you can see an example of how bad a stunt can go.