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intense: extreme; having great force
epidemic: spreading and affecting many people
aCtivitY 2.3
continued
My notes
interpret the text Using Close reading
9 Kori Johnson is the cheerleading coach at Costa Mesa High School in Southern California. She says the cheerleaders have had to step up the degree of difficulty over the years.
10 “The girls, they want to be the best,” said Johnson. “They want to try harder stunts. So every year when we see new stunts we try them.”
Cheerleading as Competition
11 Costa Mesa High boasts a championship cheer squad.
12 Squad members say people who don’t think cheerleading is a sport should just
try it.
13 “They should be open minded about it,” one cheerleader said. “We throw people.
14 Like our bases are lifting like people up in the air.”
15 “It’s like bench pressing a person,” a second cheerleader said.
16 A third cheerleader said not everyone could keep up.
17 “We had the water polo boys stunt with us last year and they like, quit, after like
an hour,” she said. “They said it was really intense.”
‘it’s scary. it’s scary.’
18 Johnson is an experienced coach with safety training and cheer certifications. She says the key to avoiding major injuries is teaching stunts step by step.
19 “I would never ask them to do a stunt that they’re not capable of doing and trying,” said Johnson. “So we make sure they have all the basic stunting and it’s like stairs. We move up the ladder.”
20 But as many parents already know, injuries are now simply a part of cheerleading.
21 “It’s scary. It’s scary,” said Lynne Castro, the mother of a Costa Mesa cheerleader. But Castro said cheerleading was too important to her daughter to stop even after she suffered a serious injury. “You see other sports figures that have injuries and they just get on with it, you know. You fix it, you rehabilitate properly, and you move forward.”
22 But there’s no coming back from some of the injuries cheerleaders now risk. An injury is deemed catastrophic if it causes permanent spinal injury and paralysis. There were 73 of these injuries in cheerleading, including two deaths, between 1982 and 2008. In the same time period, there were only nine catastrophic injuries in gymnastics, four in basketball, and two in soccer. ...
23 In 2008, 20-year-old Lauren Chang died during a cheer competition in Massachusetts when an accidental kick to the chest caused her lungs to collapse.
24 “Lauren died doing what she loved, cheering and being with her friends,” said Nancy Chang, her mother, soon after the accident. “We hope her death will shed light on the inherent risks of cheerleading, and we hope that additional safeguards are taken.”
25 “It’s a national epidemic,” said Kimberly Archie, who started the National Cheer Safety Foundation to campaign for more safety practices in cheerleading. “I think we should be extremely concerned as a nation. ... [It’s] a self-regulated industry that hasn’t done a good job. If I was going to give them a report card, they’d get an F in safety.”
106 SpringBoard® English Language Development grade 6
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