Cyber Max

Levels of Safety

There are three levels of safety/injury in the sport of cheerleading in the two different cheerleading sports. Cheerleading ranks as the most dangerous women’s sport in all safety areas. The first level of safety involves catastrophic injury in which involves permanent paralysis or death. The second level of safety involves injuries for which the athlete must receive hospital care. The third level of safety involves injuries which require missing or altering an athlete’s practice or competition schedule.

Height and Motion

There are logistical reasons why cheerleading is dangerous. Any activity involving height and motion involves the risk of injury. Cheerleading utilizes tumbling (motion) and basket tosses and pyramids (height and motion) and thus is inherently dangerous to some extent. Choosing to participate exposes cheerleaders to an increased risk of injury, including the risk of catastrophic injury.

Performance Areas

Cheerleaders, except in competitions, perform on surfaces designed for an entirely different sport. Basketball floors and football fields were not designed with cheerleaders in mind to even a minor degree. Even the layout of most basketball and football (and other sports) facilities are not planned with a specific cheerleading area designated, so cheerleaders are stuck performing around the edges of anther sports playing area.

Failure to Warn

One of the legal liabilities of any sport and certainly any sports injury lawsuit involves the failure to warn the participants in the activity of the dangers of their participation. There seems to be little doubt that cheerleaders, especially young cheerleaders, and their parents are not sufficiently aware of the dangers they are being exposed to by participation in the sport of cheerleading. While we are not in favor of the sometimes recommended scare tactic methods of warning athletes of dangers (don’t create self-fulfilling prophecy psychology), there is no doubt that cheerleaders would be safer if they understood that safety practices are never to be bypassed.

Cheerleading Competitions

Cheerleading has split into two distinct sports, although some programs perform and compete in both. Cheerleading used to be an athletic activity designed to act as a support system for other sports. There was more interest in boosting school and team spirit than in increasing skill difficulty. Cheer competitions changed all that as difficulty was introduced as an important factor in judging cheer competitions.

Alphabet Soup

There has been a proliferation of cheerleading associations, matching the rise of the popularity of cheerleading competitions. Often, the primary motivation for the start-up, operation and management of cheerleading associations is financial. Coaching and safety considerations, other than at their own competitions, camps and clinics can often fall by the wayside when the primary association activities are financial.

For More Information
For even more of the type of in-depth information about cheerleading in this article and other interesting and informative products, see our Cheer Zone web site at: http://gymnasticszone.com/CheerZon.htm

15 Books and Counting
John Howard is the author of 15 books and e-Books about cheerleading, gymnastics, gym design, and gymnastics humor. More books are already on the way. He has 25 years experience and has coached State, Regional and National champion gymnasts, international competitors and cheerleaders at the National level in NCAA Division I.

Enter the Gymnastics Zone

GymnasticsZone.com is a highly informative gymnastics, strength and cheerleading information web site for gymnasts, cheerleaders, coaches and parents with numerous FREE articles and information, fun pages and activities all available for viewing at: http://GymnasticsZone.com

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If you watch situation comedies, the one thing that you will notice, or at least should notice, is that situation comedies make fun of real life situations. That’s why they’re funny, because they’re all about things we can relate to. On an episode of “Home Improvement” Jill asks Tim if he’s ready to go with her to some party. He replies by telling her he has to watch the game. Jill, seeing that he had just finished watching a game, says to him that she thought he had just done that. Tim’s reply is, “That was the game BEFORE the big game”.

Yes, America is obsessed with sports. It doesn’t matter what the sport is even. Baseball, football, basketball, hockey, horse racing, you name it. If there is some kind of sporting event on the tube, you’re typical American male can be seen sitting in front of that tube, remote in one hand and a cold beer in the other. And if you think that sounds like a situation comedy, then you haven’t been to a typical American home with a wife, a husband and 2.5 children. It is more typical than you can imagine. That’s why many American homes have more than one TV. The wife will lock herself inside one room watching her soaps, while the kids have a TV in their room to watch cartoons and the husband has his big screen TV all to himself to watch, well, whatever sporting event he can find.

And it doesn’t even matter what time of year it is. There is ALWAYS something on the tube to watch. In the spring, summer and fall there is Major League Baseball. In the summer, fall and part of winter there’s Professional Football. In the fall, winter and spring there is Pro Basketball and Pro Hockey. In the spring and summer there is the PGA tour. In fall, winter and spring there is the PBA tour. In the fall and spring there is horse racing. The list goes on and on. You can’t turn on your TV set one day out of the 365 that science has given us without seeing something that resembles a sporting event.

The question we need to ask and answer if possible, is why? Why are American men so obsessed with sports? Many psychologists feel it is simply a male macho thing, to put it in layman’s terms. The American male is so insecure about his own masculinity that he feels the only way to show the world that he is indeed a man is by watching sports. Some men take this to extremes in that they will only watch sports that are considered “cool” sports or the ones that only “real” men watch. Football is right up at the top of this list because it is so violent. A man who sits in front of his TV with a beer watching a football game is a “real” man. Nobody would ever dispute that.

The truth is, nobody really knows why American men are so obsessed with sports. Maybe the answer is simpler than what we keep searching for.

Maybe they just like sports.

Michael Russell
Your Independent guide to Sports

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Are they still racing stock cars?

It seems like a loooong time since Daytona, doesn’t it? When the Smokeless Set takes the checkers at Las Vegas Motor Speedway this Sunday afternoon, it’ll have been a full three weeks since the 500, a span during which the boys held a boring Fontana race that saw the stands half-filled, and then took a week off to celebrate, uh, some Christian holiday I probably don’t understand. And it’s not exactly the time of year that’s going to make the public rush out and think “NASCAR.” A mere few hours after the race on Sunday, the NCAA will announce its March Madness brackets, sending stock-car racing toward the kind of anonymity it experiences only one other time each year: when the NFL kicks off.

Nevertheless, Nextel Cup racing is about to get good. The flattish-tracked Vegas race has the potential to be a bit strung-out and boring, but there have been several good events here. Even better, the boys head down to ridiculously fast Atlanta next week, and then comes Thunder Alley in Bristol. Three more different driving experiences, you’re not likely to find.

What can we say about Vegas? (I mean: what can we say about the track. I know what we can say about the city. It’s fun. And where’s my wallet?) The 1.5-miler in the desert doesn’t drive anything like the high-banked 1.5-milers in places like Texas, Charlotte or Atlanta. Its corners are banked a mere 12 degrees, which puts it on par with venues like New Hampshire and (believe it or not) Martinsville. When looking for comparisons, I like Loudon as the most direct resemblance, but I’ll take a look at patterns from all three other “flatties,” too: Phoenix, Martinsville and Richmond. None of these tracks are as big or as wide as Vegas, however; this place is its own entity.

Matt Kenseth won the 2003 and 2004 events, and was a heavy favorite to three-peat before finishing eighth here last spring. Jimmie Johnson was king in the desert a year ago: he led five times for a total of 107 laps, and put an end to Kenseth’s streak. The Smokeless Set has only been running here since 1998, and has only featured six winners: Kenseth, Johnson, Mark Martin (’98), Jeff Burton (’99 and ‘00), Jeff Gordon (’01) and Sterling Marlin (’02). Burton’s dominance here came at a time when he was lapping the field at both Phoenix and New Hampshire, which gives those track comparisons even more credence. So who’ll roll nothing but sevens on Sunday? Read on.

Two weeks ago: Greg Biffle dominated the first Fontana event, but blew up late, and when he did, I threw stuff around my apartment. However, Biffle’s loss was my gain: his teammate Kenseth, whom I’d also selected and at more favorable odds, took the lead after The Biff failed, and won the event outright. Considering I also had Kenseth over Tony Stewart, it was a double-win for me: +4.44 units for the week. That puts me at +1.44 for the season.

Christopher Harris is a featured writer for the Professional Handicappers League.
Read all of his articles at http://www.procappers.com

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