UO fans do splits on cheer as a sport.

Byline: Mark Baker The Register-Guard

At one time, Sports Illustrated magazine ran a weekly item called "Sport ... Not a Sport?" in which such endeavors as bingo, hot-dog eating, the biathlon, squash, curling and synchronized swimming were analyzed by athletes.

Perhaps competitive cheerleading is fit for such an analysis.

Cheerleading? A sport?

With the University of Oregon's recent announcement that, beginning in the 2008-09 school year, it would join the University of Maryland as the only NCAA schools to make competitive cheer a separate varsity sport for women, complete with scholarships and an annual budget, it's been a hot topic of discussion among UO sports fans.

"I already bought my tickets!" jokes longtime UO fan Dan O'Shea of Eugene. "I figured Mac Court would be sold out and they'd have to use Autzen."

All kidding aside, O'Shea, whose nephew Rick O'Shea was a top member in the 1980s of the Oregon wrestling team - which got the ax in the Title IX equation that will bring back baseball and add women's competitive cheer at the UO - says cheerleading "probably" is a sport. "I'm not going to say anything against it. They're real gifted athletes."

But a varsity sport? "It just seems to me that it should almost be a club sport," O'Shea says.

Actually, competitive cheer has been a coed club sport at UO since 2003, the same year Maryland turned its program into a separate varsity women's sport. In fact, UO cheerleaders already have won a national championship in competitive cheerleading, in the 2005 United Spirit Association's Collegiate Nationals for coed teams in the large school division.

By making competitive cheer a separate women's varsity sport, the UO moves closer to being in compliance with federal gender-equity requirements under 1972's Title IX legislation, and its all-female competitive cheer team will be eligible to compete in the National Cheerleading Association's annual college championships held every April in Florida, says Jamie Fryback, a former UO cheerleader and now an assistant stunt coach for UO cheerleaders. The NCA championships are typically packed with cheer teams from East Coast schools, Fryback said.

The UO still will maintain a separate coed competitive cheer team as a club sport, she says, in addition to its usual "spirit" team of coed cheerleaders who perform at UO football and basketball games. Cheerleaders who fill the expected 35 spots on the new women's competitive cheer team will not participate on the spirit team.

"Jumping and flipping"

Cheerleaders - high school or college - many years ago moved beyond being pompom-waving, "we've-got-spirit-yes-we-do" sideline promoters who emerged sometime in the 1880s. The first recorded yell - "Ray, ray, ray! Tiger, tiger, tiger! Sis, sis, sis! Boom, boom, boom! Aaaaah! Princeton, Princeton, Princeton! - on an American campus was performed at Princeton University.

Today, they call themselves athletes. It would be hard to argue otherwise, given the dangerous routines, the flips, the stunts, the maneuvers they perform. Proponents say it takes years of training and skill, just as with any other sport; that it's no different than gymnastics, figure skating or any other sport that's scored by judging instead of a direct competition between another athlete or team, as in football, basketball, soccer or track.

Such arguments have little impact on some UO fans.

"The only people who consider competitive cheer a sport are 13-year-old pixies and their frustrated wannabe failed head cheerleader mothers," writes Dennis Renton, 45, a 1984 UO graduate, to The Register-Guard from Overland Park, Kan., where he's an executive with Volkswagen of America.

"If you want to see young women jumping and flipping about, why doesn't the UO introduce a real sport that has jumping and flipping - gymnastics?"

Maybe sex appeal has something to do with the UO's decision, says Renton, a former high school wrestler. "Who would you rather watch? Pretty girls in short, tight skirts, or two sweaty guys with cauliflower ears rolling around on a mat?"

Jeanne Havercroft, a longtime member of the Daisy Ducks, the women's booster group for UO athletics, doesn't take kindly to such comments. "That is so demeaning. That's not what (the cheerleaders are) out there for. They put in hours and hours and hours doing it.

"Why shouldn't they have it as a sport?" asks Havercroft, who says most Daisy Ducks feel the same way. "We need to keep adding women's sports. I know people in crew are mad, but I don't think crew was quite ready."

The UO athletic department also considered bowling, equestrian, crew and water polo before picking competitive cheer to balance Title IX requirements with bringing back baseball for men - dropped after the 1981 season. In making the announcement earlier this month, the UO said the fast-growing sport of competitive cheer matched facility needs and potential growth. The UO wanted to be "innovative" and "think outside the box," said Senior Associate Athletic Director Renee Baumgartner.

"As athletic as any other sport"

Whether you believe that competitive cheerleading is a sport, there's no question it can be dangerous. Cheerleaders build human pyramids and tumble through the air into their teammates' waiting arms. And they make a lot of emergency room visits.

According to a CBS News report last year, 208,800 young people ages 5 to 18 were injured while cheerleading between 1990 and 2002. Most of those, about 40 percent, were leg, ankle and foot injuries. During a 20-year study, from 1982 to 2002, the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research found that 18 high school cheerleaders suffered serious injuries, including one fatality. That cheerleader died a week after she fell while attempting a stunt during practice and hit her head on a gym floor, according to the organization's Web site.

A college cheerleader died in similar fashion during that 20-year period, and a 14-year-old high school freshman, Ashley Burns of Tewksbury, Mass., died in August 2005 after she was tossed in the air during a routine and landed chest-down in a teammate's arms, according to an Associated Press story.

Still, competitive cheerleading is said to be the fastest-growing sport nationally among young girls. And by having 35 additional spots for a separate women's cheer team, the UO will be able to make more girls' dreams come true, Fryback says.

Every year, she says, more than 100 young women try out for five or six spots to join the UO cheerleading team, considered one of the better teams in the nation.

Whatever the data show, sentiments remain mixed about the UO's decision and the general status of cheer.

"They are as athletic as any other sport, especially if we're including golf in the picture," 1996 UO graduate Shannon Hodges of Albuquerque, N.M., wrote in an e-mail. "It makes sense too (to add it) ... They don't need their own new facility, doesn't seem like a lot of additional money to be spent."

The UO plans to hire a new coach next year for the women's competitive cheer team. Plenty of other UO fans and alumni disagree with Hodges.

" I am all for women's sports, but keep it legitimate; cheering is not a sport!" wrote Rich Munroe, a 76-year-old UO alum and retired University of Arizona physical education professor who now lives in Pinetop, Ariz. Swimming and gymnastics, sports the UO eliminated for men and women in the 1980s, are internationally recognized sports that would have made much more sense to bring back, Munroe says.

Deanna Johnson, a 2005 UO graduate from Omaha, Neb., and an English-language teacher in South Korea, agrees with Munroe that bringing back swimming or gymnastics for women - just as the UO is bringing back baseball for men - would have been a better choice. "Isn't having competitive cheer buying into women stereotypes?" Johnson said. "Is the UO trying to send the message that young girls wanting to compete on the college level need to be doing so in short skirts and skimpy tops? Have we really reached the point where we place more importance on glorified cheerleaders than a hard-working athlete?"

Added Deborah Dawkins, a television producer in Knoxville, Tenn., and a 1992 UO graduate: "I recognize that a good deal of athletic skill is required in cheerleading, but I think it's more of a competition than an actual sport. I certainly would have preferred that the University bring back a women's sport that could generate Olympic contenders such as swimming or gymnastics, but I'm supportive of any endeavor, even cheerleading, if it will allow more young women and men to be eligible for scholarships and have the opportunity to go to the UO."