EDMONTON - Paige Parks says cheerleading takes her breath away - and once, it was with the violent force of a car wreck that felt like she'd smashed every bone in her rib cage.
The 17-year-old flyer with the Harry Ainlay High School cheer team says the crash occurred two years ago, in practice.
Her teammates tossed her in the air for a kick double stunt. Up she went, higher, higher, then plunging down, down, rotating once, twice - then over-rotating - and crashing past the outstretched arms of her base crew like an anvil through a threadbare safety net.
Wham-whoosh, she body-slammed the mat stomach-first, knocking the wind out of her in a microsecond.
"It's like you broke your ribs and you can't breathe. Your immediate instinct is to curl up, but then you still can't breathe," she said.
Parks had no lasting injuries, but still remembers looking up with trepidation before she took to the sky again.
"It's always scary to fall. It's like 'Oh my goodness I don't know if I can do it again.' But you just have to get over that."
As participation soars on cheer teams in the United States and Canada, injuries are also on the rise for a sport once the preserve of pompoms and megaphones but now transformed into a wildly popular rough and tumble trapeze show.
At the University of North Carolina, the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research recently reported there have been 112 catastrophic injuries to high school girls in the United States over the last 26 years, 65 per cent of which happened in cheerleading.
College numbers are not tracked because the governing body, the NCAA, does not consider it a sport.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission reported there were close to 27,000 emergency room visits in the U.S. in 2007 due to cheerleading injuries. About 15 per cent were head and neck injuries.
Similar statistics are not kept in Canada, but Leanne Livingston of the Alberta Cheerleading Association questions any comparison.
"Injuries do happen, it's just like any other sport," said Livingston. "But in my experience in cheerleading for over 25 years, there has never been any kind of catastrophic injury."
Deanna Mason of the Ontario Cheerleading Federation also said she couldn't think of such a disaster north of the border.
"I've never heard of paralysis or death in Ontario," she said.
Mason bristled over media reporting of the U.S catastrophe numbers, which she said have implied cheerleading is reckless and dangerous.
"It's really unfortunate. I know there are a lot of coaches and programs that are really safe and never had severe injuries. But it can happen in any sport."
When catastrophe does strike, it's heartbreaking.
The Center details a cheerleader being hit by a flyer and suffering a blowout eye fracture. Another gets kicked in the face and lapses into convulsions. A third breaks her neck in the equivalent of a head-first, two-storey fall and has a halo brace bolted to her skull.
On Kimberly Archie's National Cheer Safety Foundation website - dedicated to making the sport safer - you can look at a photo of young Laura Jackson hooked up to a ventilator. The Michigan woman fell in a practice stunt six years ago and ended up a quadriplegic.
There is a photo of former varsity cheerleader Brittany Noffke of Wisconsin. In 2004, with her spotter out of position, Noffke fell backwards off a pyramid head-first onto a tile floor, severely injuring her skull.
Her case, and the resulting lawsuit, made national headlines this past January when the state's supreme court ruled that cheerleading is a contact sport and that teammates therefore could not sue each other for accidentally causing injuries.
Finally, there's a black and white shot of 14-year-old Ashley Burns of Massachusetts, a young teen who loved doing her hair, talking on the phone, watching the TV show "CSI," and cheerleading. Four years ago, she landed the wrong way, chest down, on her teammates arms, ruptured her spleen and died.
"She loved (cheerleading)," said her mother, Ruth Burns, on a website dedicated to her memory. "I never thought in a million years she would die doing it."
At Edmonton's Harry Ainlay, cheer team coaches Chelsey Harris and Meagan Tracey watch over Parks as she tumbles through routines on mats.
The team is the reigning provincial champion. Harris said that starts with safety and a focus on the fundamentals.
Students are evaluated to make sure they can physically perform what is being asked of them, she said.
New jumps and stunts are practised - and practised - on mats and trampolines before any flyer is sent airborne. Stunts are worked on at the start of practice and not the end, when athletes are tired. Pyramids can't be more than two-high. No inverted stunts. Any kind of bump and bruise to the head, neck or back and it's off to the hospital.
Tracey urges parents of young gymnasts to check out the coach's credentials and visit the gym, ask about the training regimen, make sure the mats are good quality and not wafer-thin yoga sheets.
When things go wrong, she said, "It's usually a case of the coach not knowing their athletes, pushing the athlete beyond a skill they're capable of."
In Alberta, said Livingston, certification has been mandatory for six years to ensure coaches know the best, safest way to teach the stunts.
In Ontario, Mason says they're still fighting school board by school board to make coach and safety training mandatory. They're making progress, she said, but there is resistance.
"There are people who have been coaching for a really long time and believe that their experience should speak for itself," she said.
Dianne Greenough, coach and choreographer of the Edmonton Eskimo Cheer Team, says coaches must work hard to keep up with a sport that has exploded in popularity in the last few years with the advent of private club teams and all-star squads.
"Club teams have completely changed cheerleading," said Greenough, who manages a 50-member squad of men and women, half of them stunters, including flyers who are regional or national-calibre gymnasts.
High schools, she said, struggle to compete with flashy club teams that offer better equipment, the chance to perform more daring stunts and travel abroad.
In Ontario, Mason said the migration is even more pronounced: "We've seen a huge decline in school cheerleading programs in the last five to 10 years. We're seeing a lot of experienced and successful coaches move into the club environment."
"The sport is growing by leaps and bounds."
At Harry Ainlay, 17-year-old Elaine Rosery hopes the growing cheers will drown out the snickers and snorts she still hears by the lockers before class.
"I like how there's more stunting and stuff," said Rosery, whose role as a base is to throw flyers in the air and catch them. Her worst injury: a cracked nose.
"We're actually taken seriously at our school now because of it instead of them saying, 'Oh, you just have pompoms and stuff."'
"We're serious athletes, we train hard, and now we just get recognition for what we do."
