All-Star News Show On Cheer Safety

I thought it was a great piece and highlighted a lot of the major problems I see in cheer today. I'll definitely be saying a prayer for Patty and her family tonight. Thanks for posting it King

Wow...I was dropped when I cheered for allstars just from a bow and the first thing that hit the gym floor was my head. No mats. Just gym floor. I was lucky all I ended up with was a concussion. And they say this isn't a sport. There's no excuse for no training for a coach. That's just asking for it.

The same points that Kingston and others have made before are made again in this so there wasn't anything groundbreaking, but it is great to raise awareness.
Safer surfaces/equipment, proper technique and extensive, hands-on coaches training, are all absolutely 100% necessary. Now, how do we go about making them standard?

Great piece.... Im just a hard booty but seeing that family brought tears to my eyes. I dont wish that upon my worst enemy. My heart aches for them.

So sad for her and her family. This is the primary reason my daughter doesn't do school cheer.

The only thing I feel like the story was used as a scare tactic. It was a devastating story and I am truly sorry for the girl and her family, but I don't necessarily think that she was injured by untrained coaches and poor performance areas. It was kinda a freak accident that could happen in any sport. Non the less it was still probably effective in raising awareness. I agree with him in that it would be expensive to make school cheerleading a sport and I think that that is what is holding it back. I was lucky to have two former college cheerleaders who had worked at an all star gym from the time they were in college as my school coach. Other schools are not so lucky.

GreatWhite92 said:

The only thing I feel like the story was used as a scare tactic. It was a devastating story and I am truly sorry for the girl and her family, but I don't necessarily think that she was injured by untrained coaches and poor performance areas. It was kinda a freak accident that could happen in any sport. Non the less it was still probably effective in raising awareness. I agree with him in that it would be expensive to make school cheerleading a sport and I think that that is what is holding it back. I was lucky to have two former college cheerleaders who had worked at an all star gym from the time they were in college as my school coach. Other schools are not so lucky.

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Agreed.. it was an unknown condition that could have happened in any sport. It was almost unfair for them to use it. Otherwise, great video. I loved the TSC consultant.. very knowledgeable and well spoken!

I think you all are looking at it as: This girl had a rare condition that this would have happened anywhere.

I look at it as does untrained coaches create an environment when people do have rare conditions they will with a higher percentage of bad things happening. It is all about signal and noise in statistics (read Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver! great book).

It is all about percentage chance of things going wrong. Bad coaches mean higher percentage. No mats: higher percentage. Non spring floor: higher percentage.

Wow this story touched my heart. Patty has some amazing parents. The sad thing is that people who don't want cheerleading to be a sport, don't think about the safety of cheerleading. It's just a stupid activity to most most people. People just don't get it. After years of arguing with people, I don't even care if they think cheerleading isn't a sport anymore. That argument get's tiring. It seems like the only people who can change cheerleading are the people who are/where involved in cheerleading.

School cheerleading coaches need to be trained. Heck, when I tore my meniscus in high school, my coach did nothing. She really thought if she sat there looking in the corner of her eye at me on the floor, not giving me any of her attention, I was just going to get up and keep going. Anything could have happened. These are the reasons why cheerleading should be a sport. Every kind of cheerleading.

I appreciate you posting this. Definitely makes you thankful for the coaches who keep up on their credentials and keep our kids safe. Even though I truly believe these type of injuries are more likely to occur in "non-all star" cheer environments, like HS basketball, football games, etc...it has opened my eyes to always stay on my toes even with my cp and her teammates. Sometimes when they get together, they just can't help themselves and start stunting for fun...not anymore, that's for sure! Supervision and proper technique are #1.

I will followup with the difference between forecasting and prediction.

Prediction is saying this specific event will happen. I predict Orange will win worlds. I am making a specific statement about something happening. Predictions are a black / white, yes / no, binary statement. Did Orange win worlds. Did it happen. If Orange wins I am a genius! If Orange loses I had no idea what I am talking about. Most people think of the world in predictions, but it doesn't really work that way. A good example is earthquakes. We are terrible at predicting earthquakes (saying they will happen this day or even this year). We really have no idea if an earthquake is going to hit today.

Forecasting is giving the percentage chance of something that would happen. Orange is 90% likely to win worlds. Meaning there is a 90% chance. There is room for error and them not winning, but you can see the chances are very high. And if we were to run this year many times over (like the move Groundhog day) each year would be independent of itself. If Orange were to lose this year (notice I said they have a 10% chance of winning) and we went to run the year again it is not guaranteed they will win because they just lost the year before. Each year (or event in talking about forecasting and statistics) is independent of each other. It is kinda like playing the slot machines. You have a 1 in a million chance of hitting the jackpot. If you put in a quarter, pull, lose it is not like the next time you play there is a 1 in 999,999 chance. It doesn't count down. This is more how the worlds operates. Though we are terrible at predicting earthquakes we are actually REALLY good at forecasting them (you have a higher chance of experiencing an earthquake if you live in California as opposed to Georgia). So lets take this thinking to the situations.

Each cheer routine, each skill, each everything has a percentage chance of injury. I cannot predict when someone will get injured, however I can fairly easily forecast what situations have a higher chance of injury (tumbling on concrete is going to produce more injuries than tumbling on a spring floor). One of the biggest contentions is that stunting on hard floor has the same percentage chance of injury as stunting on spring floor. And the evidence in that comes from a very small sample size (usually a month or one team or even one year). However if you followed and tracked every cheerleading team in the nation on every surface over a 5 year period you would find the rate of injury percentage is a lot higher when you are on hard floor. It is a completely different way of thinking about every event. Cheerleading and cheerleaders in general do not think about skills and training in percentage chance of hitting or not hitting, but I do. In fact my experience at Rays is that whether they use a number in their head they all do (and I think it is one of the reasons they are very successful). So, to think about this video and everything in general about safety you cannot say if something is safe or not. You have to say which has a higher percentage chance of something happening.

Bad coaching: higher percentage chance.

Hard floor: higher percentage chance.

Kid has rare condition that no one knows about: higher percentage chance.

So if there is bad coaching and they have hard floor then it is MORE likely the kid with the rare condition no one knows about will have something bad happen to them. Not guaranteed mind you, just more likely.

I fear if something isn't done to reduce the number of costly injuries, cheerleading will become taboo in the insurance world. In less than a year we have had a CT scan, a dislocated knee cap (MRI needed to find bone chip that broke off), and 2 x-rays to the same wrist. The insurance companies have to be crunching the numbers to find out how much this is costing them.

GreatWhite92 said:

The only thing I feel like the story was used as a scare tactic. It was a devastating story and I am truly sorry for the girl and her family, but I don't necessarily think that she was injured by untrained coaches and poor performance areas. It was kinda a freak accident that could happen in any sport. Non the less it was still probably effective in raising awareness. I agree with him in that it would be expensive to make school cheerleading a sport and I think that that is what is holding it back. I was lucky to have two former college cheerleaders who had worked at an all star gym from the time they were in college as my school coach. Other schools are not so lucky.

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definitely agree! I only cheer hs my senior year because I was so involved at FCA the other years and we had just got new coaches. I knew more than she did about rules and regulations. She was very nice and usually pretty careful about things but only when I told her something wasn't allowed or it had to be done a certain way to be legal for hs. She was smart enough to listen to those of us who had resources to know what we were allowed to do but the fact that she didn't know it herself is the scary part.