Stacked Cheerleaders

[TimTaylor]

Originally Posted by Snaqwells

Unless your state or locale has a standard, then it's strictly a safety issue. I simply remind the cheerleaders that if there's a collision, I'm not going to be the one who gets hurt (most likely).
If the cheer coach is talking to you, remind her of that fact, and of the fact that we run full speed sometimes with our heads turned the other direction.
And, as JR alludes, to, as far as we're concerned, the cheerleaders are fans.

I actually had this happen once - while sprinting down just inside the sideline looking over my shoulder while covering a fast break, a cheerleader stepped into my path and I hit her at full speed. It barely slowed me down, but she flew about 5 feet through the air and slid another 10 after landing - fortunately she wasn't seriously injured, but I'll bet she was a very sore young lady for a day or three afterward.

Ever since, I've made it a point that whenever there are cheerleaders at the game, I talk to the head cheerleader using that incident as an example and make it clear that for safety reasons, we don't want them within 3 feet of a sideline or 6 feet of an endline when the ball is live.