If there’s no one to cheer after a touchdown is scored,
did anyone really score a touchdown?
That is a question that only Oregon State University’s
athletic department will be able to answer when the Beavers open up
the football season next August.
On Monday, Oregon State Associate Athletic Director Marianne
Vydra announced that the school’s cheerleading squad had been
dissolved. Why? Apparently it is just too risky being a modern-day
college cheerleader.
Just weeks after a Southern Illinois University cheerleader fell
from atop a pyramid and was injured, Oregon State decided that the
athletic program did not provide its cheer squad with enough
security.
The school’s athletic directors also figured that it would
cost too much money to make any necessary changes, so the
cheerleading squad would have to be destroyed. A glorified Beavers
yell crew, including members from the old cheer squad, will act as
a lame surrogate.
And you thought UCLA was ridiculously PC? What’s it coming
to when a good ol’ fashioned, red-blooded cheer squad
can’t perform its backflips without some bureaucrat standing
in the way?
It was initially expressed to the OSU cheeerleaders in an e-mail
that they would no longer be able to perform acrobatic stunts, but
on Monday it was revealed that the cheer squad was being dropped
altogether in favor of the safer and more suburban yell crew. The
crew will sport orange sweaters and khakis and handle megaphones
and placards.
In other words, it will have the same milquetoast qualities that
every college yell crew so unwittingly employs.
(In my mind I see each yell crew member around the country
eating Wonder Bread dipped in mayonnaise during halftime.)
The OSU cheerleaders want to perform at each and every major
athletic event for the school. The chance of injury is something
they feel is worth the risk.
“It is a dangerous sport, but every single sport is
dangerous,” OSU cheerleader Louie Paul told a local news
station. “How many football players get injured every
year?”
Paul is right on the money. Except about the whole
“cheerleading-is-a-sport” mantra. There is no such
thing as a sport that cheers for another sport. Maybe a football
player is just pushing an oblong ball across a line, but at least
it’s an act completely independent of any other activity.
But if the cheerleaders want to risk injury to form pyramids and
do flips at football games, why not let them? If they break their
necks, that’s their problem.
The OSU athletic department is trying to protect itself from any
possible lawsuits in case a cheerleader gets severely hurt. The
administrators aren’t completely unjustified either.
According to a recent study cited by ABC News, there are 16,000
cheerleading-related injuries on average each year. Just over half
of them are strains and sprains, but that means that almost half of
the injuries are more severe.
In light of this, OSU’s athletic department should just
make the cheerleaders sign waivers that clear the university of any
negligence. But that just makes too much sense.
For all those people who chastise UCLA for being too rigid and
politically correct, just remember that your school has never made
headlines in an embarrassing cheerleading controversy.
The whole saga will leave the Beaver football and basketball
teams without any bona fide cheerleaders during big games.
It’s pretty strange to think of a big-time Division I sports
program without them. Part of the excitement of college athletics
is the pageantry of the wild student body, the dancing mascot and
the shaking pompoms.
Before I get carried away and start to sound like Dicky V, just
think of the future of Pac-10 sports with such a subversive
undercurrent from the school leadership. The NCAA has already
gotten its football officials to penalize players at the first sign
of a celebratory act, even after a game-winning touchdown in the
closing moments of the game.
I hope that every athletic director in the country takes one
look at what has become of the OSU cheerleaders and laughs. Because
if any more administrators become this tightly wound then they
might be able to really achieve some big things. If they try hard
enough, maybe they can remove all the mania out of college
sports.
Where will the madness end? And who will pass the pompoms on to
the next generation of Beaver cheerleaders?