Cheerleading has a branding problem.

It sits in that strange cultural zone where millions of people assume it is either (a) a group of teenagers smiling widely in coordinated skirts while holding fuzzy accessories, or (b) a vaguely sinister pep cult that exists to make sports feel more like a Roman spectacle. In other words, cheerleading is seen either as background decoration or as a high-school musical number with a snack-budget and a megaphone.

Modern cheerleading, meanwhile, has quietly evolved into something that looks less like “rah rah” and more like “human trebuchet.” The sport has tumbling passes, basket tosses, multi-person pyramids, and flying bodies traveling through the air with the serene confidence of someone who has never met gravity before.

That mismatch between image and reality is why conversations about cheerleading injuries often sound like two people yelling past each other through a wall: one side insisting it’s harmless spirit squad stuff; the other side insisting it’s basically stunt work without the union.

Both sides have a point, and both sides also have a tendency to use statistics the way people use garlic: to ward off evil, not to understand it.

So let’s do the responsible thing and talk about the real risks, the myths, the trends, and the part where we discover that American presidents have, at various points, led cheers. After all, it wouldn’t be a Commonplace Fun Facts article if we didn’t convolute things with obscure historical plot twists.

The Numbers Tell A Troubling Tale

Before we go any further, let’s address the statistics that tend to get repeated in discussions about cheerleading. Some of them are true, some of them are slightly off, and some of them are technically correct but emotionally misleading — which is the best kind of correct if you’re trying to start an argument on social media.

A common claim is that cheerleading accounts for two-thirds of all serious sports injuries suffered by girls in the United States. That sounds dramatic, and it is — but it also needs a tiny translation. The statistic refers specifically to catastrophic injuries, meaning injuries that result in permanent disability, severe neurological damage, or fatal outcomes. Studies of high school and college athletics have repeatedly found that cheerleading accounts for roughly 65–70% of catastrophic injuries among female athletes. That is not the same as all injuries, and it is not the same as “most dangerous sport overall,” but it does mean that when something goes very wrong in girls’ sports, cheerleading shows up in the data more often than expected.

Recent national estimates suggest that roughly 30,000 to 35,000 emergency department visits each year in the United States are related to cheerleading injuries. The exact number fluctuates depending on reporting methods, but the key takeaway is that it’s a significant figure — especially if your current understanding of cheerleading danger involves nothing more threatening than aggressive pom-pom waving.

These numbers are particularly concerning when you consider how rapidly the sport is growing. In 1990, there were about 600,000 cheerleaders in the United States. Today there are more than 3 million participants.

Cheerleading remains overwhelmingly female in participation, with 96% of U.S. cheerleaders being female. This is an ironic twist, considering that the sport began as an all-male activity — a historical plot twist we’ll get to later.

So, to summarize without triggering a statistics committee revolt: modern cheerleading involves millions of participants, produces tens of thousands of injuries annually, and accounts for a disproportionately large share of catastrophic injuries among female athletes. The numbers are real, the context matters, and the full story is more complicated than the internet usually prefers.

Cheerleading’s Great Identity Crisis

Part of the confusion is that “cheerleading” is not one single thing. It is a category label slapped on several different worlds:

• Sideline cheer (school spirit, chants, some stunting, sometimes mostly crowd leadership)
• Competitive cheer (routines judged on difficulty, precision, and execution)
• All-star cheer (private gyms, year-round training, heavy emphasis on advanced stunts and tumbling)
• Youth and recreational cheer (where the goals, coaching, and safety culture can vary wildly)

When someone says, “Cheerleading is dangerous,” they are often talking about competitive and all-star cheer—the versions with repeated high-difficulty stunts—because that is where the most serious incidents tend to cluster.

When someone says, “Cheerleading isn’t dangerous,” they may be picturing a sideline squad that mainly does chants, basic motions, and a few low-level stunts. That version can still involve injuries, but it is not typically the same risk profile as tossing someone overhead in a gym where the soundtrack is always a remix of a remix.

One word is doing a lot of work here: stunts.

Cheerleading became substantially more dangerous as it became substantially more aerial. The moment a sport includes lifting humans above head height and then throwing them, it has entered into a new and meaningful relationship with the emergency room. Physics, after all, can be a cruel and unforgiving master — something this writer learned early in life while attempting to climb the rope in gym class and instead achieving third-degree friction burns on both hands, both thighs, and what may have been the appendix.

Exploring the Dangers of Cheerleading: Does it Have the Most Injuries?

Cheerleading is not typically the top sport for total injuries in the way that, say, football, soccer, basketball, and gymnastics can be depending on age group and reporting method. Plenty of sports rack up injuries through sheer participation volume and constant contact.

Cheerleading’s grim special talent is not necessarily the highest overall injury count. It is the disproportionate share of the worst-case outcomes, especially among girls.

In other words, cheerleading is often less about “most injuries” and more about “most injuries that make everyone utter a collective gasp before going silent.”

That distinction matters because the internet loves a simple sentence, and reality loves footnotes. When people throw around the line that cheerleading accounts for “two-thirds of serious sports injuries” for girls, what they usually mean—when you chase it down—is catastrophic injuries, not every sprain and fracture that ruins a season.

Catastrophic injuries are the ones that involve permanent disability, severe neurological trauma, or death. They are rare in sports overall, which is good. They are also the injuries that become disproportionate in cheerleading when you compare it to other girls’ sports, which is not good.

That is not an argument that cheerleading is uniquely evil. It is an argument that a sport involving airborne bodies has a higher ceiling on how badly something can go wrong when it goes wrong.

The Other Big Myth: “Cheerleading Is Just Like Dance”

Dance is athletic and can be risky. Anyone who has watched a ballet dancer’s feet up close knows those people live in a world of disciplined pain.

Cheerleading, though, mixes dance-adjacent performance with acrobatic partner work. It is closer to a hybrid of gymnastics, stunt performance, and synchronized choreography than it is to “a cute halftime routine.”

That hybrid is where the danger comes from, and it also explains why some cheer injuries seem so different from other sports. A soccer injury is often about speed and collision. A cheer injury is often about falls, drops, and mis-timed catches. Those can produce wrist fractures and ankle sprains, sure, but they can also produce head and neck trauma in ways that are less common in non-aerial sports.

Cheerleading is not the only sport with head injuries, obviously. It is the sport that sometimes produces them through a mechanism that sounds like a cartoon until you picture it happening in real life: “The flyer fell from the stunt.”

The Reality: What the Injury Numbers Usually Mean (and What They Don’t)

As previously mentioned, cheerleading is responsible for producing in the neighborhood of thirty thousand emergency room visits annually, give or take, with plenty of room for methodological caveats. That is a lot. It is also not “every cheerleader is constantly being airlifted to a trauma center.” Most of these injuries are not catastrophic. Many are the usual sports mix: sprains, strains, fractures, and contusions. The catastrophic cases are rare, but they are the ones that change how the sport is discussed because the stakes are so high.

Trends are complicated, too. Over the last decade or so in some national analyses, total E.R. visits associated with cheer have not marched upward in a neat line. Some analyses show overall visits decreasing while certain categories—like concussions—represent a larger share of the injuries that do occur. That could reflect better awareness and diagnosis, changes in participation patterns, changes in reporting, changes in rules, or all of the above in a trench coat pretending to be one simple explanation.

So, yes: cheerleading produces a large number of injuries nationally. No: the story is not as clean as “it keeps increasing forever,” and anyone who tells you it is has probably just fallen in love with their own narrative arc.

So What Injuries Are We Talking About?

Cheer injuries cluster around a few predictable categories, because the human body is predictably vulnerable in specific ways.

1) Sprains and strains

Ankles, knees, shoulders, wrists—if a body part can twist in a way it was not designed to twist, cheerleading will eventually test that theory. Landings from tumbling and awkward catches are frequent culprits.

2) Fractures

Falls and collisions inside stunts can lead to broken bones, especially in upper extremities when someone instinctively throws out a hand to break a fall. The body has many emergency instincts. Some of them are helpful. Some of them are a wrist fracture in disguise.

3) Head injuries and concussions

Head injuries are one of the main reasons cheerleading is now discussed in the same breath as other higher-risk sports. A fall from height, a knee to the head during a stunt, a collision during tumbling—none of these require malice. They require timing.

4) Catastrophic injuries (rare, but central to the conversation)

These are the injuries that keep safety researchers up at night and keep parents quietly staring at the ceiling at 2:00 a.m. They are rare. They are also the ones that show up disproportionately in cheerleading when you compare catastrophic outcomes among girls’ sports.

That combination—rare but disproportionately severe—is why cheerleading’s danger profile is so often misunderstood. It is not “constant disaster.” It is “low probability, high consequence,” which is exactly the kind of risk humans are famously bad at intuitively evaluating.

Why Cheerleading Became More Dangerous Over Time

Cheerleading did not start as a flying sport. It started as an organized way to lead chants, generally performed by men in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The earliest cheerleaders were essentially “yell leaders,” which sounds like a job in a medieval army but was, in fact, a college tradition.

Over time, cheerleading became more performative, more athletic, and more oriented toward visual spectacle. The rise of organized competitions and all-star programs poured gasoline on that process. Competitions reward difficulty. Difficulty rewards training. Training rewards the kind of people who are willing to spend their adolescence learning how to be thrown into the air by other adolescents.

The trendline is not mysterious. It is the same one you see in figure skating, gymnastics, snowboarding, and any sport where difficulty is a competitive advantage: routines get harder, which means the sport gets more impressive, which means the failures can get more dramatic.

Modern cheerleading is also practiced a lot. Many serious injuries occur during practice, not performances, because practice is where repetition meets fatigue and where athletes attempt new skills. The crowd is not watching. Gravity, however, never averts its unforgiving gaze.

Safety Rules, Coaching, and the Places Where Cheer Happens

One of the weirdest parts of cheerleading’s safety story is how uneven the infrastructure can be.

Some programs have excellent coaching, progressive skill development, strict rules about what stunts are permitted at which levels, proper surfaces, trained spotters, and a safety culture that treats “no” as a complete sentence.

Other programs are, to put it delicately, operating on hopes and dreams.

Cheerleading exists in schools, private gyms, community programs, and competitive circuits, which means standards can vary. That variability affects risk. It is the difference between “structured athlete development” and “we saw this on TikTok and it looks fun.”

Common safety improvements over time have included:

• More detailed stunt-level rules (what is allowed at each level of competition)
• Emphasis on proper progression (master lower skills before higher ones)
• Better mat technology and better practice environments
• Increased attention to concussion protocols and recognition
• Stronger coaching education and credential expectations in many programs

These changes do not remove risk, because risk is baked into the act of lifting and throwing people. They do, however, reduce the number of moments where a teenager learns a hard lesson about the difference between “confidence” and “control.”

The Helmet Question (and Why Safety Gear Can Be Weird)

Some cheer programs have experimented with protective headgear—especially during training for certain stunts. The idea is obvious: if the worst outcomes involve head and neck trauma, then protecting the head seems sensible.

Safety gear, though, has an eternal philosophical problem: it can change how people behave.

Football has wrestled with this for decades. Helmets protect against certain injuries, but they can also encourage a “use your head” style of contact because the brain trusts the helmet more than it should. The head was not designed as a battering ram. The human species has done many impressive things. Making the skull into a weapon is not our best work.

Cheerleading has its own version of that debate, although it looks different. A helmet might prevent some injuries, but it could also create false confidence in situations where the real safety issue is the stunt itself: the height, the timing, the catch, the technique, and the training environment.

That does not mean helmets are useless. It means helmets are not a substitute for skill progression and strict safety standards. A helmet is a last line of defense. It is not a plan.

The Not-So-Secret History: Cheerleading Was Originally Male

Cheerleading’s early history is one of America’s favorite genres: things we now gender-code as feminine used to be male-coded until culture changed its mind.

Early cheerleading, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, was largely an all-male “yell leader” activity. It involved leading chants and coordinating crowd energy. There were no pom-poms in the modern sense. There were no miniskirts. There was, however, an emphasis on loud leadership, which is something men have historically enjoyed.

Women gradually joined cheerleading in greater numbers in the 1920s and beyond, and the gender balance shifted dramatically over time, especially in the mid-20th century. Cultural expectations around school spirit, performance, and gender roles all played a part.

That shift also set the stage for cheerleading’s current identity crisis: the sport grew more athletic and more dangerous at the same time it became more culturally dismissed as “not serious,” which is a deeply inconvenient combination if you want resources, safety staffing, and respect.

Presidents, Movie Stars, and Megaphones

One of the best ways to remind people that cheerleading is not inherently “a girls’ thing” is to point out that a number of famous men were cheerleaders, including individuals whose job descriptions later involved global war and nuclear weapons.

That sentence should feel strange. It is also apparently true.

George W. Bush: Head Cheerleader and High Commissioner of Adolescent Theater

George W. Bush is often cited as a notable male cheerleader because he served as the head cheerleader during his senior year at Phillips Academy in Andover. It is one of those biographical details that tends to stop conversations for a moment, if only because it feels like the opening line of a screenplay no one quite knows how to categorize.

At Andover, Bush also organized a stickball league — a street-style version of baseball played with improvised equipment — and, in keeping with the grand traditions of teenage governance everywhere, appointed himself “High Commissioner” and generally ran it with the theatrical seriousness of a 17-year-old who has discovered the power of a costume. Reports describe him conducting business with theatrical seriousness, complete with a top hat, as if presiding over a major sporting federation rather than a collection of teenagers with broomsticks and tennis balls.

The league, by all accounts, embraced a sense of humor that occasionally veered into the juvenile, which is perhaps the most historically accurate detail of the entire story. Biographers often point to this period as an early illustration of Bush’s ability to combine showmanship, organization, and a willingness to lean into the role of class clown when the moment called for it.

Whatever one thinks about his later career, it is difficult to argue with the uniqueness of a life story that includes the title “head cheerleader” on the résumé. History contains many serious people. It contains far fewer former cheerleaders who eventually find themselves signing official documents in the Oval Office.

Dwight D. Eisenhower: The Cheerleader Who Later Organized a Small European Errand

Dwight D. Eisenhower is frequently listed among notable male cheerleaders. The image is hard to resist: a future Supreme Allied Commander, leading chants in a school setting, before spending a chunk of his life dealing with the kind of logistics that make normal people sit down and stare into space.

For a while, it appeared that it would be the athletic field rather than the battlefield that would define Eisenhower’s life. Read “When History Hung on a Minor League Baseball Career” for more about that chapter of his life.

If your brain can only associate Eisenhower with “stern military leader” or “Cold War president,” consider that both roles saddled him with the responsibility of spurring people to do more than what they thought was possible. How much more “cheerleader” can you get?

Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Original Commander-in-Cheer

FDR also appears on lists of famous male cheerleaders. This detail often surprises people because FDR is remembered through the lens of the Great Depression and World War II, and a wheelchair, not through the lens of youthful school activities where everyone was all smiles.

That surprise punctures the idea that cheerleading is “not serious” by linking it to people we consider serious by definition. The United States has never been able to resist the symbolism of a man who once led cheers and later led a nation.

Jimmy Stewart: The Cheerleader Who Could Have Talked You Into Anything

Jimmy Stewart is another name frequently mentioned as a former cheerleader. This one is less shocking and more perfectly fitting, because Jimmy Stewart had the kind of earnest, likable presence that could make an entire crowd feel like they were part of something wholesome, even if the actual event was a football game where everyone’s fingers were numb.

Stewart also served as a military pilot and had a serious service record, which again reinforces the point: “cheerleader” is not a personality type. It is an activity. People do it. People later do other things. Some people later become beloved movie stars. Some people later oversee military campaigns. Some people later become presidents and still somehow find time to be “High Commissioner” of a stickball league in the origin story.

So, yes: men have been cheerleaders, including famous men. Cheerleading started with men, shifted over time, and now lives in a gendered cultural box that does not actually match its history or its athletic reality.

Why the Myths Persist (and Why They Matter for Safety)

Cheerleading’s safety discussion is uniquely tangled because the sport is both widely practiced and widely misunderstood.

When a sport is dismissed as “not real,” it can be denied resources. It can be under-supported by athletic trainers. It can be left out of safety planning. It can be treated as extracurricular theater rather than a high-risk athletic activity that deserves the same level of medical and coaching infrastructure as other sports.

That dismissal can be subtle. It can show up as budget decisions. It can show up as uneven coaching requirements. It can show up as a lack of structured progression. It can show up as adults assuming that cheer is basically dancing with megaphones, which means they are unprepared for the reality that the squad is practicing basket tosses after school.

Cheerleading is also caught in a cultural contradiction: it is expected to look effortless and cheerful, even when it is physically demanding and risky. That expectation can discourage athletes from admitting pain and injuries. It can also encourage a “smile through it” culture, which is not ideal when the “it” might be a concussion.

So Where Does That Leave Us?

Cheerleading is dangerous in a specific way.

It is not always the sport with the most injuries. It is the sport with a high share of the worst injuries among girls’ sports because it includes stunting—often at height—and because practice and repetition create opportunities for falls and head impacts.

Cheerleading is also safer than its worst headlines suggest, because most participants will not suffer catastrophic injuries, and because many programs have improved rules, coaching, surfaces, and safety culture significantly over time.

The truth is not “cheerleading is harmless.” The truth is not “cheerleading is a death wish.”

The truth is something much more annoying: it depends on the level, the program, the coaching, the stunts, the training environment, and the safety standards. The truth is that cheerleading became a modern athletic sport while much of the public kept treating it like decorative background noise.

That mismatch is the real problem. People do not protect what they do not respect.

Cheerleading deserves respect as an athletic activity, which means it deserves the kind of safety attention that athletic activities require. The pyramids are optional. The spinal cords are not.

Somewhere, a future president is currently learning a routine in a gym, being tossed into the air by teammates, landing cleanly, and thinking, with the confidence of youth, that gravity is a negotiable concept.

Gravity, as always, disagrees. The goal is to make sure the disagreement remains theoretical.

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