According to the New York Times, two cheerleading organizations are lobbying the National Collegiate Athletic Association to have cheerleading officially recognized as a sport.
Let me just settle the matter right now. Cheerleading is not a sport.
Few cheerleaders actually compete in national competitions. Their primary purpose is to root on the sidelines for male athletes.
The girls wear make up and use curling irons.
Sure, they do athletic moves (sometimes), but so do ballet dancers and the Rockettes.
If colleges can count cheerleaders as athletes, then they won't be pressured by the Title IX act to provide real sport activities for girls.
http://www.hulu.com/embed/Q7WHSTsOKSAY_ZRrZE3LtA
Apt. 11d 
I agree with you that this is basically a cynical move seeking to balance male and female sports slots (ala Title 9) by putting cheerleading on the scales. Presumably they could also add ballet and modern dance and irish dance (all of which I would prefer to adding cheerleading, even if they do effectively tip scales, but, at least their purpose is not to cheer for someone else).
Did you read the article in the NY times about title 9 shenanigans to try to protect huge B-ball & football rosters? I don’t see this as a “grassroots” pro-cheer lobbying effort anyway — it’s just another means to protect football.
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“The girls wear make up and use curling irons.”
I take it that it’s time to eliminate ice skating as an Olympic sport.
A lot of girls and women like sports activities (like skating and gymnastics) with a strong aesthetic component. Cheerleading is a very natural extension (although admittedly, there’s been an undesirable recent convergence between cheerleading and pole dancing).
A better argument against cheerleading is that it is extremely and unnecessarily dangerous.
“For high school girls and college women, cheerleading is far more dangerous than any other sport, according to a new report that adds several previously unreported cases of serious injuries to a growing list.
“High school cheerleading accounted for 65.1 percent of all catastrophic sports injuries among high school females over the past 25 years, according to an annual report released Monday by the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research.”
http://www.livescience.com/2775-girls-dangerous-sport-cheerleading.html
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It seems pretty clear to me that if you are one of the ones who “actually compete in national competitions” then you are engaging in a sport as much as gymnasts or figure skaters or any of those other weird sports where you don’t know how well you’ve done when you’ve finished because you’ve got to wait and see how the East German judge marked you. (As a competitive swimmer in high school, I also rarely knew if I won or not when the race was over, but that was largely chlorine-related.)
If you are just cheering on the boys, then you are not competing in a sport any more than the marching band is.
If I were in charge, I’d set up a series of regional competitions that you had to participate in weekly for, say, 12 weeks between December and February. The teams that showed up were competing in a “sport.” The ones who stayed home to cheer for the Men’s Football and Basketball teams weren’t.
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My impression is that cheerleading has moved from cheering for the high school football team to competing through for-profit facilities. I think that has largely contributed to the increase in injuries. I’ll bet that the majority of the girls in these outside squads don’t even cheer for their own high schools.
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It seems to me that by definition cheerleading is not a sport, because it is cheerleading. But they could rename it then there wouldn’t be a problem. Except all the problems that laura and Amy identify of course. But it least it wouldn’t have defined itself as a non-sport.
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The 65% number isn’t really meaningful without a baseline. Further reading suggests that there are something on there were on the order of 140 catastrophic sports injuries to women participating in high school & college sports in the last 25 years. So, at least the statistic isn’t skewed by 2 of the 3 injuries being cheerleading (i.e. the base is higher). But, the number is still not meaningful unless we know what percent of female athletes are cheerleaders. If it were 90%, 65% of the injuries would mean that cheer was relatively safer.
(I don’t think that’s true, but the numbers as reported in the articles aren’t meaningful, and are an example of poor use of percents and ratios in journalism).
Oh, and as a comparison, there were about 700 catastrophic injuries in high school football alone, over the comparable period of time. Cross country, field hockey, and soccer had 21 CI’s, yielding, in that limited calculation, 97% of injuries being football related. That does convince *me* that football isn’t a sport, but I doubt if many others would be convinced by that statistic.
(Cross country, btw, is very safe — only 1 serious injury in the last 25 years).
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With regard to the numbers, in football, you’re purposely crashing into other people with your body (albeit with a helmet), or you’re being flattened by a 300-pound guy. In cheerleading, if dangerous contact (with a teammate or the floor) happens, it’s an accident, although the cheerleading routines themselves are inherently risky.
Here’s a 5-minute video with an profile of a young woman who was paralyzed after an accident at high school chearleading try outs:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37020978/ns/health-fitness/t/flying-without-net-cheer-injuries-rise/
The video shows some of the flying moves. They say in the videos that cheerleading routines have gotten progressively more ambitious and acrobatic over the years, with a lot of flying around. They also say that there are 30,000 cheerleading ER visits every year (if I’m hearing correctly).
Maybe if cheerleading were viewed as a “real sport,” rather than as a cute girl activity, there could be better safety guidelines.
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I’m not sure I think cheerleading is a sport, but I do think cheerleaders are athletes.
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“I’m not sure I think cheerleading is a sport, but I do think cheerleaders are athletes.”
That’s an interesting distinction.
Speaking of fun facts about foreign countries, chess is regarded as a sport in a number of Eastern European countries, including Russia.
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The girls wear make up and use curling irons.
In high school, a dedicated field hockey player told me that cheerleading could not be a sport because they wear those “ridiculous short skirts”.
This is what field hockey skirts are like.
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Eeh. Volleyball shorts are better.
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Tennis skirts?
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Declare cheerleading a sport. See if I care.
Then ban it. Ban football too.
The catastrophic injuries in cheerleading seem to happen to the “fliers,” the teeny tiny girls who attempt high-flying acrobatics.
I can think of no reason for educational institutions to encourage sports which have such high rates of head injuries.
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From the looks and record of my daughter’s high school football team, they aren’t athletes either.
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But Siobhan, those pictures of the girl field hockey players are beautiful. There’s nothing wrong with their bodies or exposing their legs. Cross country runners wear less. The difference is these hockey players aren’t wearing short shirts to turn on boys or to look cute. They are wearing short skirts, because they need to run fast and get at the ball. There aren’t trying to be seductive or flirtatious. They are trying to hit that ball in the net. Look at their muscles! Their determination and power! Just awesome.
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I thought it was pretty clear in the field hockey pictures that the girls had shorts on, and that the “skirts” were essentially decoration, like baseball players wearing stirrup socks or something. That’s what you’d expect, I’d think, from serious players, and those players certainly looked serious.
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More pictures of strong women athletes here.
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Catastrophic injuries in horseback riding are probably higher than cheer — though nothing matches football: approximately 4/year, for kids <20 years old, yielding approximately 100/year, and with a presumably lower participation rate in the activity.
(Data from an Ontario study)
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How many schools field horseback riding teams?
I’m not bothered by the makeup angle. As far as I’m concerned, I would be fine if dance were made a sport. Also, ultimate frisbee.
What’s the purpose of sports at schools and colleges? Is it to advocate for healthy, lifelong aerobic pursuits? Or to create circuses for spectators?
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“The difference is these hockey players aren’t wearing short shirts to turn on boys or to look cute.”
I’m more with Amy P.: figure skaters wear short skirts, and it’s basically to look cute. Furthermore, I wouldn’t be so sure about women athletes generally. Female runners wear much skimpier clothing than male ones, and I can’t imagine why bare midriffs would make women go faster and not men. I think it’s basically a fashion gesture. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
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I can’t imagine why bare midriffs would make women go faster and not men.
Belly hair?
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“As far as I’m concerned, I would be fine if dance were made a sport.”
I’ve seen a few step team performances recently, and it’s obviously very physically demanding, much more so than say golf. I think step deserves to be a sport. (Guys do it too, though, so it wouldn’t fix the Title IX problem.) On campus here, a lot of groups (fraternities, sororities, etc.) field step teams and take it pretty seriously as an intramural activity.
“What’s the purpose of sports at schools and colleges? Is it to advocate for healthy, lifelong aerobic pursuits? Or to create circuses for spectators?”
At school, hopefully healthy, lifelong aerobic pursuits (although the circus aspect is present, too). At college, it’s mainly circuses for spectators (at least for popular sports like football and basketball). Of course, the circus sports subsidize the less popular college sports.
I did track in high school and it was a positive experience, but very different from what Laura describes, presumably because Laura was a genuine track and field goddess and I was just rank-and-file. What I got out of it was basic physical fitness, not blimping out in my mid-teens, camaraderie, the opportunity to make frequent trips out of my small town (Waldenbooks! McDonalds!) and a sport for my college application. All of that was good and important, but it’s not the sort of life-changing event that Laura talks about. Nothing I did in track had anything to do with leadership. I was just a girl who’d start a two-mile race and finish it, and that was good enough.
Looking sexy is obviously a pretty big deal in women’s tennis and women’s soccer (remember the famous Brandi Chastain photo?).
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/cover/featured/9700/index.htm
bj,
I’m assuming that in equestrian sports, the dangerous stuff is the jumping.
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I’m assuming that in equestrian sports, the dangerous stuff is the jumping.
Jumping is dangerous, but there are plenty of ways to get hurt around horses. They are big, strong, fast, and not entirely predictable.
I had a friend killed in a riding accident when her horse panicked and she got her foot stuck in a stirrup and her head kicked. My wife has permanent neck injuries from a fall when her horse spooked. I have an injury to my chest that has never fully healed from being kicked (and I was lucky–if I’d caught the kick with my belly I’d probably have ended up in the hospital.)
I love horses and loved riding, but doing anything other than riding around in circles on a bored horse in a ring is dangerous.
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On horse riding, recently a top dressage (think ballet on horseback, if you’re not familiar) rider had a fall in practice and suffered serious brain damage. It has lead to many dressage riders, even top ones, wearing helmets regularly for the first time- almost all wear them in warm-up now, and some even wear them in competition. (The traditional head gear in a dressage competition is a sort of top-hat that provides no protection.) Good dressage horses are very strong and often a bit “hot”, but the moves done themselves are not especially dangerous. But as SamChevre says, pretty much any time on a horse can be dangerous.
(A good friend in Russia who works with horses had the terrible experience recently of seeing the child of a stable owner killed by one of his horses- a big heavy draft horse, just by the horse accidentally smashing her against the wall of the stall and putting his weight against her chest. a freak, but hardly implausible, accident.)
That said, I would be much more happy to have my kid (if I had one) take riding lessons from a careful trainer than I would be to have him play football.
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SC,
Now you’re going to make me feel bad about sending my 8-year-old to therapeutic riding (although they do require helmets, forbid riding over concrete, screen horses carefully, and have a lot of volunteers on hand).
I took a lot of falls myself when I was a horse-crazed teenager, but the horse in question was really evil. Now that I’ve heard more about head and spinal injuries, I realize how lucky I was. Although I had probably too much freedom in horse handling, my parents were very clear on forbidding the use of stirrups because of the dragging issue.
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I remember seeing barrel racing at the county fair. They had six year old kids racing around those barrels on quarter horses. It looked fun, but I don’t think I could gallop a horse.
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The therapeutic stable we go to has several Ponies of the Americas (POA), which I am getting to be a big fan of. They’re a sort of small spotted horse, and they’re bred to be good with kids.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pony_of_the_Americas
I don’t really like to see kids on the really big horses–it’s too far down.
Once the kids graduate from the riding program, they can continue as volunteers. There are a couple of teenage autistic girls who do that.
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But Siobhan, those pictures of the girl field hockey players are beautiful. There’s nothing wrong with their bodies or exposing their legs. Cross country runners wear less.
My point exactly — trying to decide what’s a sport based on aesthetics, as in the quote I was originally responding to, is just silly.
Especially because this:
The difference is these hockey players aren’t wearing short shirts to turn on boys or to look cute. They are wearing short skirts, because they need to run fast and get at the ball. There aren’t trying to be seductive or flirtatious.
is not remotely true! I played field hockey and lacrosse in the era of large, long* pleated plaid skirts. It was not the slightest bit restrictive. The change was driven entirely by the fact that teenage girls want to look sexy for the guys lacrosse team, even if those girls are themselves lacrosse players. Those skirts were dowdy. Period.
My winter sport was swimming, and same thing there: I was leaving high school just as the two piece trainer suit really took off (at least in my area, late 90s). Did this actually improve performance times for anyone who didn’t already have a PAC10 swimming scholarship? Hell no, although that’s what we told our parents. We were teenagers, and we wanted to feel attractive, and baring our bellies was one way to accomplish that.
(* By “long”, I mean long enough that they covered your ass cheeks, unlike in the photos above — but not anywhere approaching, say, knee length.)
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I agree with Siobhan. Clothing for male athletes (e.g., basketball shorts) has gotten much more concealing in my lifetime; clothing for female athletes (e.g., bare midriffs for runners) has gotten much more revealing. I highly doubt that the change has anything to do with enhancing athletic performance.
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