Your post links the 2024 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/22/magazine/cheerleading-jeff-webb.html?unlocked_article_code=1.VVA.cJzt.B1vLYzHL5868

Jennings was a budding star, and at 13 she joined a competitive gym called Rockstar Cheer in Naples, Fla. She was the golden child of her coach, Carlos Realpe — even if he sometimes pushed her too hard. Like when he ran practices late into the evening on school nights. Or when Jennings pulled a hamstring and he threatened her position on the team unless she pounded ibuprofen and powered through the pain. Or when he screamed and threw shoes and water bottles. (Realpe denies throwing things; two other team members supported Jennings’s account.) Parents of other children complained about Realpe’s coaching style, but Jennings brushed it off.

Her junior year, Jennings slammed into a teammate’s shoulder during a basket toss, snapping her head back and giving her yet another concussion — her seventh. Soon afterward, she got sick from an unrelated illness and became depressed. Baker sent her an email cutting her from the squad. She could have lost her scholarship, too, had the athletic director not intervened on her behalf.

Two years ago, at 21, Jennings retired from cheerleading with a chronic hip injury, occasional slurred speech and intermittent headaches that she called “stingers.” She resolved to seek treatment for a traumatic brain injury. It was only when she was out of cheer entirely that she realized her difficult career in the sport was more than just a random string of bad luck. Jennings’s experience — of injury, grueling hours and emotional abuse — is not an uncommon one in the vast world of American cheerleading. “Every day I make more and more pieces click,” she said.

Despite Varsity’s early opposition, 36 states and the District of Columbia now recognize cheer as a sport. It remains an outlier: None of the National Federation of State High School Associations’ other 17 member sports have this patchwork state-by-state designation, said Dr. Karissa Niehoff, the chief executive of the federation. Nor is there another sport where a for-profit company like Varsity is so intricately linked to its governance, she said. Varsity remains a corporate partner with the federation. “I find them to be a wonderful company to work with,” she said.

Sports-medicine experts have routinely proposed making cheer a sport in the remaining states and at the college level, which would mean improved access to certified and qualified coaches, athletic trainers and medical care, limits on practice time, improved facilities and inclusion in injury-monitoring data.

From 1980 to 2001, emergency-room visits for cheerleaders soared nearly 500 percent. Over that same period, competitive cheerleading was responsible for more catastrophic injuries to female athletes than all other high school and college sports combined, according to the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research. And those statistics included “bases,” the girls at the bottom of the pyramid, who were at lower risk for head injuries. Restrict the data just to flyers, the girls being tossed in the air, and injury rates became “semi-suicidal,” according to Dr. Robert Cantu, medical director of the research center.

“The flyer was the riskiest person in all of women’s sport,” he said recently. By some metrics, the risk of catastrophic head and spine injuries was higher in cheerleading than in football.

At practice that year, as the team prepared for Varsity’s upcoming college nationals, Parks stood atop the pyramid, ready to execute a high front flip into the waiting arms of her squad. A teammate held onto her feet too long. “So instead of flipping, I just dove — like into a swimming pool with no water.” She landed on a two-inch-thick foam mat on top of concrete, breaking her neck in five places.

When teammates visited her in the hospital, they found a stranger. Most of Parks’s hair had been shaved for surgery and the rest sat in an awkward mullet, with a huge scar running around the top of her head. She underwent three operations, had a permanent shunt placed in her spine to drain fluid from her brain and endured years of physical therapy.

Despite Varsity’s early opposition, 36 states and the District of Columbia now recognize cheer as a sport. It remains an outlier: None of the National Federation of State High School Associations’ other 17 member sports have this patchwork state-by-state designation, said Dr. Karissa Niehoff, the chief executive of the federation. Nor is there another sport where a for-profit company like Varsity is so intricately linked to its governance, she said. Varsity remains a corporate partner with the federation. “I find them to be a wonderful company to work with,” she said.

Sports-medicine experts have routinely proposed making cheer a sport in the remaining states and at the college level, which would mean improved access to certified and qualified coaches, athletic trainers and medical care, limits on practice time, improved facilities and inclusion in injury-monitoring data.

Later, litigation would allege that the new safety organization was independent in name only: Some U.S.A.S.F. staff were full-time Varsity employees who “volunteered their time”; Varsity bought its web address; and the two organizations shared office space.

Goodness, this should really be the focus instead of Charlie Kirk, Pickleball, or speculating about sex offenses (on the last matter he’s already transitioned cheerleading from a male-only sport for chrissakes). And that’s just from the first
quarter half of the article.