High School Hs Higher Stunting Difficulty

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When I was in HS we pancaked out of our pyramid.....We all went to dip to pancake and you kind of need to move your head out the way in that stunt but the backspot with tallest flyer had stepped in my space in his effort to keep contact with her...I sacrificed my face for the sake of my flyer.

Our groups are pretty distributed. I know as a base who is small (long limbs, if I got the stomach flu and lost 10 pounds I'd be in the air), I appreciate a tall back spot when I'm basing girls who are taller than me, it's good for evening out the stunt.

Im not saying it's a bad thing by any means! I think it keeps more stunts in the air lol When I distribute stunts I try to work it that, instead of one tall group, we have a bunch of short groups with tall back spots!
 
I'm a level 6 college cheerleader and I still am emotionally scarred from the pancake stunt from HS. I didn't double in AS and the rules changed mid way through my HS career so I never did doubles until college. And I rather double than do a pancake.

Flyer or base?
 
Im not going to argue that doubles should be allowed but IMO pancakes NEED to go. A lot of people call them "Suicides" for a reason, and I see them go wrong at nationals and state all the time.
This. We did them successfully the first year they were legal. Only 1 injury from the pancake stunt the entire season. The top girl went a little to hard on the fold one day and gave herself a concussion by hitting her head on her own knees. Freak accident. I had a team full of capable kids that could perform the stunt successfully and safely. The back and forth I had all season with our AD defending the stunt wasn't worth the headache. We don't do it anymore. The kids ask to learn them every year and I just say "oh we've done that, we're not gonna do it again." I wouldn't be sad to see them become illegal again. When I did them in all stars they were suicides for a reason!
 
I think the reason I hate them is probably because Im a backspot so when things go wrong I can't do anything but watch my flyer hit the floor....
I think with the way things are going they're just going to get more dangerous too. Theres a HUGE trend in AS and HS of rearranging groups to make sure the back is always super tall comparatively to the group and super strong so that they can make saves, but that means the bases are getting used to having the strength of the back helping them and then suddenly the flyer comes crashing down and the back isn't there to help.

What you describe sort of defeats the conversation about doing skills safely and with good technique. Those coaches who are justifying that their kid has learned a skill because they've managed to find a way to make it happen by relying on an out of proportion to reality back spot are kidding themselves. This goes for any coach who uses a guy in a group stunt. It's just one more way to cut corners. Coed should mean coed, one guy and one girl.
 
What's funny is that people would save thousands if they let a good coach teach their kid the right way, the first time but when you try to slow progressions, some parents complain that the only motivation in doing that is making the coach more money... SMH. The only people that win from rushing are the surgeons and PTs.

ITA and I wish I had known better at the time. My CP is not the fastest learner when it cones to tumbling anyway, and didn't even have all her level 1 skills when she started at our gym, but she had almost 5 years of doing it the wrong way to get rid of. CP has taken 5 years to get to level 3, but she has quality skills that I don't have to worry that she will get hurt throwing. Everyone in the dance world who sees her tumble asks me where she is training. Many will come take a lesson or two, but when they find out what is REALLY involved in fixing their tumbling most of them don't come back. I see some really bad and scary tumbling from dancers.


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ITA and I wish I had known better at the time. My CP is not the fastest learner when it cones to tumbling anyway, and didn't even have all her level 1 skills when she started at our gym, but she had almost 5 years of doing it the wrong way to get rid of. CP has taken 5 years to get to level 3, but she has quality skills that I don't have to worry that she will get hurt throwing. Everyone in the dance world who sees her tumble asks me where she is training. Many will come take a lesson or two, but when they find out what is REALLY involved in fixing their tumbling most of them don't come back. I see some really bad and scary tumbling from dancers.


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THIS. It takes enough work to get correct tumbling the first time, it's 10x harder to replace bad muscle memory from bad technique. At least you eventually understood, many parents and kids would just abandon the effort altogether.
 
What you describe sort of defeats the conversation about doing skills safely and with good technique. Those coaches who are justifying that their kid has learned a skill because they've managed to find a way to make it happen by relying on an out of proportion to reality back spot are kidding themselves. This goes for any coach who uses a guy in a group stunt. It's just one more way to cut corners. Coed should mean coed, one guy and one girl.


Edit: I'll reply when I get home from class.

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how the heck do you even fly in a pancake stunt? Just dive down and pike?:confused:
 
What you describe sort of defeats the conversation about doing skills safely and with good technique. Those coaches who are justifying that their kid has learned a skill because they've managed to find a way to make it happen by relying on an out of proportion to reality back spot are kidding themselves. This goes for any coach who uses a guy in a group stunt. It's just one more way to cut corners. Coed should mean coed, one guy and one girl.

We have 2 guys in our program - out of 25 kids on varsity. So, yes we do coed stunting (1 guy/1 girl) with them but not all the time. Sometimes, they are in a stunt group. In an ideal world, we'd have more guys, but we don't, so we make do. It's not about cutting corners, it's about working with what we have.

But as for tall backspots, hasn't that always been the point? Tall kids as backspots? From the conversations on here, I can tell that I am from an older generation, but I have always been taught that your tall kids serve as backspots, your shorter bases are the main bases and the medium kids are the side bases? Maybe there's some trend I'm missing where the backspots can reach knees of the flyers, but if that's going on I haven't seen it.
 
We have 2 guys in our program - out of 25 kids on varsity. So, yes we do coed stunting (1 guy/1 girl) with them but not all the time. Sometimes, they are in a stunt group. In an ideal world, we'd have more guys, but we don't, so we make do. It's not about cutting corners, it's about working with what we have.

But as for tall backspots, hasn't that always been the point? Tall kids as backspots? From the conversations on here, I can tell that I am from an older generation, but I have always been taught that your tall kids serve as backspots, your shorter bases are the main bases and the medium kids are the side bases? Maybe there's some trend I'm missing where the backspots can reach knees of the flyers, but if that's going on I haven't seen it.

I'm doing the same thing with two guys in my program. They've been in football and have only been practicing with us for four weeks. There's not enough time between now and nationals to get them ready to make an impact with coed stunting. I still consider it corner-cutting, though. Had I been interested in adjusting practice schedule to accomodate, they could have been practicing with us all year. I wasn't, so I'm cutting corners now.

The place where I've seen absurd backspots is in all stars where you have huge age ranges on the same team. I've got a 5'10" freshman girl on my team right now who was on a youth all star team last year with a bunch of 8 or 9 year olds. You know what she learned? Not one damn thing. You know what those flyers are able to do on an equal-age group? Not one damn thing. It's really awesome.
 
I'm doing the same thing with two guys in my program. They've been in football and have only been practicing with us for four weeks. There's not enough time between now and nationals to get them ready to make an impact with coed stunting. I still consider it corner-cutting, though. Had I been interested in adjusting practice schedule to accomodate, they could have been practicing with us all year. I wasn't, so I'm cutting corners now.

The place where I've seen absurd backspots is in all stars where you have huge age ranges on the same team. I've got a 5'10" freshman girl on my team right now who was on a youth all star team last year with a bunch of 8 or 9 year olds. You know what she learned? Not one damn thing. You know what those flyers are able to do on an equal-age group? Not one damn thing. It's really awesome.

This!!!! I have a ton of talent here where I am! Girls ranging from mostly level 3 to level 5. Problem is my higher level bases and backs have been with tiny youth girls their whole life and struggle to lift anyone their actual age my lower level bases and backs have lifted heavier girls but their skill level isn't has high as the other half of the team. And my poor flyers are stuck in the middle. Half of them are higher level but they're my bigger flyers and the other half are tiny but lower levels but can barely hit a straight up heel stretch. It's maddening and frustrating! Everytime we've tried to work on more difficulty it's such a struggle!!!
 
how the heck do you even fly in a pancake stunt? Just dive down and pike?:confused:

The diving down part is the technique error that's made that causes some people to think the stunt is dangerous. I call it a "foldover" as opposed to a suicide or pancake to encourage my flyers to be less aggressive. If they have adequate flexibility to do the skill correctly (I.e., they should be able to do a pike jump that's of excellent quality), then they lift UP through their shoulders, fold themselves in half and with a tip of the ankles by their backspot are able to fall forward into their landing. Having adequate flexibility allows them to not have to hurl their upper body downward in order to grab their legs, and makes the downward momentum only slightly greater than that of a cradle.

Having inadequate flexibility means they have to be super aggressive to get folded in half, causing them to literally throw their shoulders forward and down, increasing the speed of their descent. This is what causes some of them to look/turn dangerous.

It's no different than a top having adequate hip flexor strength/hamstring flexibility to smoothly pull a stretch/bow versus the one that has to kick her leg like she's going for a 75 yard field goal to win the Super Bowl.
 
The diving down part is the technique error that's made that causes some people to think the stunt is dangerous. I call it a "foldover" as opposed to a suicide or pancake to encourage my flyers to be less aggressive. If they have adequate flexibility to do the skill correctly (I.e., they should be able to do a pike jump that's of excellent quality), then they lift UP through their shoulders, fold themselves in half and with a tip of the ankles by their backspot are able to fall forward into their landing. Having adequate flexibility allows them to not have to hurl their upper body downward in order to grab their legs, and makes the downward momentum only slightly greater than that of a cradle.

Having inadequate flexibility means they have to be super aggressive to get folded in half, causing them to literally throw their shoulders forward and down, increasing the speed of their descent. This is what causes some of them to look/turn dangerous.

It's no different than a top having adequate hip flexor strength/hamstring flexibility to smoothly pull a stretch/bow versus the one that has to kick her leg like she's going for a 75 yard field goal to win the Super Bowl.
Don't the bases have to dip as she lifts up through there shoulders?
 
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