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MADISON, Wis. (AP) - High school cheerleading is a contact sport and therefore its participants cannot be sued for accidentally causing injuries, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled Tuesday in a case being closely watched in the cheerleading world.The court ruled that a former high school cheerleader cannot sue a teammate who failed to stop her fall while she was practicing a stunt. The court also said the injured cheerleader cannot sue her school district.


With this ruling could come a crop of challengers via Title IX at HS and colleges. Yes it only applies to WI and entails laswsuits regarding injuries. But rulings like this can get twisted/morphed into the area of Federal Title IX. And we all know what sports suffers the most when schools seek to comply with Title IX.

Example: School X needs another "sport" to balance out sport gender ratios for students. The school once considered cheerleading but was fearful of the injury/lawsuit possibilities. Now school X can add full blown cheerleading and be protected from lawsuits. However the school athletic budget is "limited" so another sport has to be "cut". Lets see..the rifle or shotgun or (fill in the gun sport ) has limited participation, is very male dominated, a miniscule campus profile. Cheerleading can have lots of participation(nearly 50 members I read), VERY female dominated ( great ratio adjustment factor), hugh campus profile ( young ladies in short skirts jumping around) and can cheer at the football games, alumni events, frat parties, etc.

So it is only natural... the guns go. Lets go team. RAH RAH!

right after I posted..a TitleIX challenge with cheerleading and vollyball the protagonists..but with a twist....ladies vollyball challenging being cut in favor of cheerleading. How ironic!!

Even though not involving a shooting sport..the challenge principle remains the same.

Read the article and note:

http://www.krem.com/outbound-feeds/yaho ... 67244.html

Quinnipiac eliminated men's indoor and outdoor track to help meet numbers for Title IX.

I guess the title IX thing can work both ways. Because of it, TCU added shooting as a women's sport which led them to their first NCAA title this year for the first time in decades.
I guess the real question to be answered is what the cheerleader did to deserve not getting caught?

Anonymous wrote:I guess the title IX thing can work both ways. Because of it, TCU added shooting as a women's sport which led them to their first NCAA title this year for the first time in decades.
I guess the real question to be answered is what the cheerleader did to deserve not getting caught?

Actually title IX did not work in reverse for TCU. TCU HAD a co-ed shooting team back in the 70s/80s. Dropped it for the usual reasons. Later when TCU saw they had Title IX "issues" It was a quick fix to add a womens team to augment the Title IX numbers, scholarships and publicity. Granted that TCU could have added another type of womans sport and bypass shooting, but surveys of other schools attempts to meet Title IX and not face sex discrimataion charges (how ironic) showed that riflery was an "accepted" method.

Personally, I don't see any benefit to having shooting sports attached to any college or university, especially via the NCAA. Like it or not, shooting sports are ALWAYS going to be at the bottom of the barrel in terms of funding and importance. In the college sports world, it's all about how much money the sport can bring into the department. With almost no exception, football always dominates. Shooting sports simply do not bring in any money.

I've been there: a couple of friends and I brought back shooting sports at our college in Louisiana about ten years ago. Because of the usual Title IX, we could only bring it back as a club sport, not a team sport. Because it was a state school, state school gun laws applied. We were fortunate: our campus police held the equipment for us in a safe room at the station.

Because it's a club sport, we got a couple hundred out of the school, as well as the ability to use the old weapons left over from 20 years ago. This meant Anschutz 54s and Ruger Mk IIs, most of which hadn't been cleaned in 20 years. It took me about two weeks and about 10 gallons of kerosene (Yes, I said kerosene) to clean the rifles to functional condition. Most of the pistols were in fair condition.

The bulk of our money ended up going towards ammo. Shooting coats and pants....we had T-shirts and jeans. We shot CCI Green Tag because that's what we could afford. We shot local NRA competitions because the nearest school with an active team was about seven hours away.

I shot pistol because we couldn't muster enough parts for an extra rifle. I ended up buying my extra mags because we didn't have anymore than one per pistol.

We finally called it a night when we got told how we had to open up membership to the general student population. That meant rednecks with the ubiquitious SKS, hunting rifles galore, and my personal favorite: a Mauser 98, complete with swastika carved into the stock. I enjoyed shooting the Mk II Gov't model, but we just couldn't expect the university to fund our activities especially because, as a state school, we were ALWAYS hurting for money.

As a school-affiliated activity, shooting sports are always going to be hard. Most schools just don't want to touch the idea. As campus affiliation contracts across the country, I'd rather not see kids who shoot get pigeon-holed into going to "certain schools."

I think the best place for college-age shooters is off-campus. Let them get involved with local clubs and ranges. The NRA has registered and approved tournements all over the country, virtually at every time of year. I've been doing it in grad school for a while now and it's just a much better option.

No benefit to having shooting sports at colleges? Guess it depends on who's eyes you are looking from as to the benefit. Maybe there is no money in it for the Universities but is that certainly isn't what college sports are about for the competitiors. At a minimum, it provides a few with free tuition worth 6 figures. For others, it provides some great coaching and shooting on a daily basis when they normally wouldn't have the funds, the time, or the facilities.

If it hadn't been for a college rifle club, I'd never have even encountered shooting sports. Simple fact is, college sports clubs (in Ireland at least) are the best place to encounter sports which have non-trivial startup costs. So until clubs outside of colleges start carrying large amounts of kit for beginners (something archery does all the time in the UK, and which shooting clubs in Ireland have started to do in the last few years here in Ireland), college clubs are a very good idea. Even when there's not much money (hell, I learnt to shoot on kit that was older than I was and our oldest rifle here is worth about $250 today and was made in 1939... and it still outshoots 99.99% of the club members).

Article on FOX:

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/07/21/fe ... latestnews

Hi

I'm amazed that the cheerleaders and female athletes aren't fighting this. Cheer-leading is less of a sport, and more of a performance (like dance, art, band, etc). Mainly, this LOSES the women a "real" sport like lacross, or shooting. I mean really, what basketball or football school is going to skip cheerleaders so that they can have woman's air pistol?

Whoops, somebody else in MASS got a decision THE OTHER WAY:
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/07/21/fe ... latestnews

Later

Mike
Wichita KS

[quote="weilers"]Personally, I don't see any benefit to having shooting sports attached to any college or university, especially via the NCAA. Like it or not, shooting sports are ALWAYS going to be at the bottom of the barrel in terms of funding and importance. In the college sports world, it's all about how much money the sport can bring into the department. With almost no exception, football always dominates. Shooting sports simply do not bring in any money......

I guess giving kids a chance at a good education is no benefit. There are a fair number of collegiate shooting teams who's GPAs are also helping prop up their Athletic Departments GPAs. I have had conversations with a number of collegiate shooting coaches and a few Athletic Directors and it is rare that any of the sports directly bring enough money by themselves to offset the costs of having them. The shooting sports are just the least costly to operate and maintain. If you look at Football just the cost of building and maintaining the facilities every year is a very costly effort.

The local university has one of the few indoor football stadiums in the country and they aren't even pulling enough money to cover the cost of maintenance. The university wanted to add swimming to their program and the cost of building a pool along with building would have run into probably $100 mil for an Olympic size pool and if pool system uses a chlorine system the maintenance on these items is high not to speak of the corrosion it causes to the building structure.

Yep. Further, if cheerleading is considered a sport, it would have to be governed by a sanctioning body and would come under greater scrutiny. Cheerleading coaches might actually be required to receive training and certification on teaching kids how to perform dangerous stunts and how to safely spot their cheerleaders during practices. They might even be required to know basic first aid after a girl is dropped on her neck and suffers a spinal cord injury. Lots of terrible stuff will happen if cheerleading is ruled to be a sport...best to simply consider it a mere "performance" like dance, art, or band.

mikeschroeder wrote:Hi

I'm amazed that the cheerleaders and female athletes aren't fighting this. Cheer-leading is less of a sport, and more of a performance (like dance, art, band, etc). Mainly, this LOSES the women a "real" sport like lacross, or shooting. I mean really, what basketball or football school is going to skip cheerleaders so that they can have woman's air pistol?

Whoops, somebody else in MASS got a decision THE OTHER WAY:
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/07/21/fe ... latestnews

Later

Mike
Wichita KS

I always thought cheerleading was just like the dance team, more of an athletic club than a sport. It seems odd to call it a sport because there's no direct competition with the opposing team's cheerleaders. Both schools perform simultaneously without judges. It is only when these cheerleaders go to state competitions that it becomes a competitive sport. I think it's interesting that it takes the Supreme Court to determine what activities are and are not sports.

Well in modern times competition is bad anyways, now everyone is a winner and there are no losers.

I can elaborate on the benefits to being an NCAA Rifle Student-Athlete. I'm majoring in Sports Management and we had an in depth debate on whether NCAA student-athletes should get paid. The group which said that said no, which I agree with, did an excellent interview study (trying to get my hands on the data, but not having much luck, turns out some of the info was deemed "confidential" by one school, not sure which, gotta love compliance offices). They interviewed 30-40 student-athletes from the Big Four schools here in NC (NCSU, UNC, Duke, and Wake Forest). The information they were looking for were the hidden, but measurable and quantifiable benefits to being a student athlete. For example:

Range Time
Coaching
Ammo
Targets
Sports Med
Tutoring (Drop-in and scheduled)
Computer Lab Access
Strength and Conditioning coaches
Gym Access
Printing
Insurance though AD
Travel expenses for matches (Gas, van, flights, food allowance)

Note those numbers do not include any scholarships or financial aid. Using their numbers when they interviewed me, I was receiving about $20,000 a year in benefits. Using the numbers I have now for when I would need/do these things, I come up with just under $30,000 per year.

They mentioned a number of athletes (basketball and football as you can guess), that easily made it into the $100,000s, and a few who had large medical expenses for injuries covered by the schools who topped $1,000,000. I personally broke my foot one season and the school covered my expenses except for the initial x-rays (they would have covered that too had I followed procedure at the time of the accident, but procedure wasn't on my mind). That accident was a drop in my bucket though as it wasn't a bad break.

Some intangible benefits are the friendships you make, the people there to help you adapt to college life, the free stuff you get (clothes, food, tickets) from time to time, an extra academic adviser to keep track of your grades, the memories you make, the line on your resume about being an NCAA Student-Athlete that screams team player to employers.

It was also mentioned that the small number of schools hamstrings shooters in where they can attend. Very much not true at best, or irrelevant at worst. The diversity of those schools with programs allows for someone to find the degree they want. Sure, it may be farther away than they intended, but their degree is the important part. And the fact that the vast majority of shooters are excellent students expands the possibilities of receiving scholarships. You're doing very, VERY well if you receive a 50% scholarship from the team. Rifle teams only get 3.6 scholarships max, but that doesn't mean every team has funding for a full 3.6.

But this all becomes irrelevant when the point is made that you are not going to college to major in rifle. There is no pro draft. The list of Americans who make their living off our style of shooting is very, Very, VERY short. If you need to go to a specific school for a degree and it doesn't offer rifle, then that is the right school to attend. Going elsewhere means risking one's future, or making sacrifices for one's future.

But if your school doesn't offer NCAA rifle, then shoot club rifle. If your school doesn't have club rifle, then start it (call Tori Croft at the NRA for help on how to do this). Or instead of starting the club, continue to attend and shoot matches as you have in the past as you can amongst your studies. College is the end of too many people's shooting careers and it doesn't have to be.