Importance of Safety in Cheerleading Stunts

Video Transcript

"Hi! My name is Lucy Spain on behalf of Expert Village here to talk about cheerleading stunts. Safety in stunting goes hand in hand and it's probably the most important aspect of stunting. We need to make sure for every flyer that we have in the air, we have a spotter. A flyer is going to be considered someone at the shoulder level or above. For each girl that we have in the air or man that we have in the air, we have to have a spotter on the ground. You need to take that into consideration when you're doing stunts to make sure you have enough people on the ground to be spotters for the people you have in the air. The appropriate spotting position is going to be about a foot away from your base. You want to stand nice and close. The most important aspect is that your eyes should never leave the flyer. We want to make sure we keep constant eye to eye contact with the person in the air. You're going to have to have your legs at least a shoulder width stand to give you a good grounding and your arms have to be constantly up in the air. A lot of people feel like this is silly. They're just standing there with their hands in the air, but it takes at least 2 seconds to get your arms up. If someone is falling, that could be broken bones in 2 seconds of time. It can make a huge difference. Also, when it comes to rules and regulations of cheerleading, it's definitely a required rule to keep the arms in the air at all times. Even if you feel silly, you're just going to have to get over it and constantly keep those hands up in the air. An important rule that a lot of squads are going to imply that helps monitor the safety and how important it is, is every time a flyer hits the ground, it doesn't matter if it's anywhere besides the feet, the whole squad needs to have some sort of measure they can do. Whether it be running laps, push ups, crunches, some form of condition usually. We need to remember that it's a squad. We're all in this together. If anybody gets hurt, it's not one person's fault, it's the entire squad."