Crazy, Awful Video Comes Out Of High School Cheer Coach Forcing Cheerleaders To Do Splits
Today- Police in Denver, Colorado, are investigating allegations surrounding a high school cheer coach’s intense training methods which left young team members in excruciating pain.
Shocking video released overnight by NBC affiliate KUSA shows footage of teenagers from Denver’s East High School in severe pain as they are forced into split positions while their arms are held in place — despite their screams and pleas to stop.
One of the girls in the video, incoming 13-year-old freshman Ally Wakefield, told the network that she was forced into the split position against her will by the newly-hired cheer coach. “It was tearing my ligament and my muscle at the same time,” said Wakefield, one of three East High School cheerleaders to speak to KUSA. “He was pushing down on the back of my right leg. He was pushing like with his other knee on my back to try to keep my posture straight.”
The cheer coach at the center of the investigation has been placed on leave, along with the school’s principal, assistant principal, an assistant cheer coach and the Denver Public Schools deputy general counsel.
“This is a grown man pushing my 13-year-old girl so hard against her will while she’s crying and screaming for him to stop that he’s ripping tissues in her body,” said Kristen Wakefield, the girl’s mother.
The elder Wakefield sent an email alerting school officials on June 15, but a police investigation wasn’t started for more than two months.
YIKES. That was BRUTAL to watch. And I know exactly what the psychos who are proponents of competitive cheerleading will say: It’s cheerleading. You have to be flexible. And if young Ally spent the summer at the beach, talking to her friends about snapchat or Facebook, posting pictures to her instagram, coordinating group-jump photos, running to the snack shack to get a hot dog and a cold lemonade, taking out a book and reading 1 page before checking snapchat and instagram again, asking the lifeguards what the current was doing that day, saying “we should go fishing sometime” even though they’ll never go fishing, saying “we should rent kayaks sometime” even though they’ll never rent kayaks, applying some SPF 8 and mocking their pale friend who uses broad spectrum 60+ with helioplex, pulling her bathing suit bottom down so it covers more of her butt and doesn’t look dumpy, getting annoyed when Tom doesn’t immediately like her instagram post where they’re all jumping simultaneously, picking up an errant frisbee that some kids were tossing and throwing it back to them with the worst form of all time, asking “does anyone have any water?”, talking shit about her friend Jackie when Jackie goes to get a hot dog, saying things like “should Jackie really be eating a hot dog? We have, like, two weeks until cheer season,” remembering that cheer season is almost here and STILL NOT STRETCHING…
If Ally did all of that and the summer slipped away without her stretching even once, then we have no sympathy for her.
I guess the squad has to whip her into shape any way it can, even if that means snapping every tendon in her leg like she’s on a medieval rack. By any means necessary when it comes to…competitively cheering on another team playing their game?
Shame to see coach fired so early in the process for, uhm, assaulting and torturing children. Dick.