Hip, hip, hooray, let's cheer safely today

“Right now, everyone, please pray for my daughter. We’re at the emergency room and the doctors are with her.” My niece posted this on Facebook a couple of weeks ago. Not surprisingly, it scared me. Totally. So, I immediately called my sister-in-law only to find out that my great-niece had sprained her wrist during cheerleading practice.

“Well, it could have been broken, and then she wouldn’t have been able to compete at state,” the drama-mamma told me later. Yeah, that was something to pray for. I, of course was envisioning a severe, debilitating brain injury; or a spinal cord injury that would have left her a paraplegic, or worse.

The fact is that cheerleading is a tough and dangerous sport. Don’t let the pom-poms and hair ribbons fool you. According to a 2013 Washington Post article, cheerleading is the cause of over 50 percent of catastrophic injuries, and the American Association of Neurological Surgeons classifies cheerleading as among the top 20 sports with the highest ratio of head injuries.

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