Cheerleading does not have the highest overall injury rate in youth sports, but it does lead in one critical category: catastrophic injuries among female athletes. More than 50% of all catastrophic injuries in women’s sports occur in cheerleading. That distinction is what drives much of the concern, even though sports like football, girls’ soccer, and wrestling produce more injuries per practice and game overall.
How Cheerleading Compares to Other Sports
When researchers track injuries per 1,000 “athlete exposures” (each practice or competition counts as one exposure), cheerleading falls below several major sports. A large surveillance study covering 2015 to 2019 found that football had the highest injury rate at 3.96 per 1,000 exposures, followed by girls’ soccer at 2.65 and boys’ wrestling at 2.36. The overall average across all tracked high school sports was 2.29.
Cheerleading’s per-exposure rate is lower than these contact sports, which is partly why it often flies under the radar in injury discussions. But raw rate comparisons can be misleading. Cheerleading squads practice year-round in many programs, and the sport involves a unique combination of gymnastics, acrobatics, and partner lifts performed without the padded mats and equipment that gymnasts use. That combination creates a specific kind of risk that doesn’t always show up in standard injury-rate rankings but becomes obvious when you look at severe outcomes.
Where Cheerleading Injuries Actually Happen on the Body
Sprains and strains make up the largest share of cheerleading injuries, accounting for about 44% to 53% depending on the data source. The lower body takes the biggest hit overall: legs and feet account for roughly 37% to 42% of all injuries, with ankles alone responsible for about 28%. This makes sense given the jumping, landing, and weight-bearing involved in stunts and tumbling.
Upper limb injuries follow at around 26%, with wrists and hands making up 15% to 19% of all injuries. Wrist pain is especially common in competitive cheerleading because athletes bear their full body weight on their hands during back handsprings, round-offs, and stunt support positions. The lower back is another frequent problem area. Repetitive tumbling places enormous pressure on the spine and can lead to stress fractures that worsen over time if not addressed.
Concussions Are More Common Than You’d Expect
Concussions account for about 31% of cheerleading injuries in reviewed studies, making them the single most common diagnosis in some datasets. That number is striking for a sport most people don’t think of as a contact activity. The concussion rate in high school cheerleading (about 2.21 per 10,000 athlete exposures) is actually lower than the combined rate for all other girls’ sports (2.70 per 10,000) and well below the rate for boys’ and girls’ sports combined (3.78 per 10,000). So cheerleaders get concussions less often per exposure than athletes in many other sports, but concussions represent a larger proportion of cheerleading’s total injury burden.
How concussions happen depends on your role. Bases, the athletes who lift and catch, typically get concussions from being hit by another person during a stunt. Flyers, the athletes launched into the air, get concussions from hitting the ground during falls.
Catastrophic Injuries Tell a Different Story
This is where cheerleading’s reputation for danger is well earned. Over half of all catastrophic injuries in women’s sports occur in cheerleading. Among 39 catastrophic cases analyzed in one review, 52% were head injuries and 32% were cervical spine injuries. These are the injuries that can result in permanent disability or worse.
Flyers bear the brunt of this risk. About 70% of catastrophic cheerleading injuries happen to flyers, who are uniquely exposed to falls from height during basket tosses, pyramids, and partner stunts. The combination of being elevated several feet in the air and relying entirely on teammates for a safe landing creates a hazard that has no real parallel in most other youth sports. Gymnastics has similar aerial elements, but gymnasts typically work over foam pits or padded surfaces during training. Cheerleaders often practice and perform on gym floors, grass, or track surfaces.
Bases Get Hurt More Often Than Flyers
One of the most counterintuitive findings in cheerleading injury research is that bases are actually injured more frequently than flyers during stunts. Bases account for 34% to 46% of stunt-related injuries, while flyers account for 30% to 39%. Bases most commonly hurt their head and neck (21%), knees (10%), and lower back (9%) from improper lifting, tossing, or catching technique.
Flyers, when they are injured, tend to get hurt more severely. Nearly half of flyer injuries (49%) involve the head and neck, followed by the upper extremity at 20%. So while bases get hurt more often in day-to-day training, flyers face higher stakes when something goes wrong. Stunt position is the single biggest factor that determines your injury risk in cheerleading.
Overuse Injuries Add Up Over Time
Not all cheerleading injuries come from a single dramatic fall. The repetitive nature of tumbling and stunting creates overuse problems that build gradually. Stress fractures in the spine from repeated back handsprings and tumbling passes are a well-documented concern. These injuries worsen in severity over time and can lead to long-term loss of function if athletes push through pain without rest.
Wrist overuse is another chronic issue. Cheerleaders who serve as bases or who do extensive tumbling repeatedly load their wrists with forces they weren’t designed to handle in that direction. Over months and years of training, this can produce persistent pain that limits performance even outside of cheerleading.
Why the Injury Picture Is Complicated
The answer to whether cheerleading has “the most injuries” depends entirely on what you’re measuring. If you’re counting injuries per practice or game, football is clearly more dangerous. If you’re asking which sport sends the most female athletes to the hospital with life-altering injuries, cheerleading leads by a wide margin. If you’re looking at concussion rates per exposure, several team sports rank higher. But if you’re asking what proportion of a sport’s injuries are serious head and spine trauma, cheerleading’s numbers are unusually high.
Part of the issue is structural. Because many schools and states still classify cheerleading as an activity rather than a sport, squads don’t always have access to athletic trainers, standardized safety protocols, or the same injury surveillance systems that cover football or basketball. This means cheerleading injuries are likely undercounted in national databases, and the true picture could be worse than the numbers suggest. The American Academy of Pediatrics has called attention to cheerleading safety, noting that concussion and injury tracking systems are improving but still lag behind those of more established sports.