If you see high school football or basketball games, you likely know that cheerleaders don't just jump on the sidelines and wave pompoms the way your parents' generation did. With sophisticated drills and elaborate presentations, cheerleading is as athletic and potentially as dangerous as a sport. That's why it deserves a full-fledged varsity designation to improve safety, a leading doctors' group says.

Cheerleading injures have climbed dramatically in recent decades. Risky stunts include tossing and flipping cheerleaders in the air and creating human pyramids towering 15 feet or more. About 26,000 injuries related to cheerleading by girls aged 6 to 22 occur in the U.S. every year, the American Academy of Pediatrics reported last week. That’s more than four times higher than in 1980, when cheerleading was tamer. Over the past 25 years, cheerleading has caused 66 percent of all "catastrophic injuries" – such as concussions and paralysis – for female high school athletes.

Cheerleading has become so popular that more than 500,000 high school girls currently participate – and not just at varsity games. Some schools have competitive cheer teams. Elevating it to a sport would mean more qualified coaches, consistent safety regulations, improved training on spotting techniques and better access to medical care, the physicians' group says in a new policy statement. Best-practice safety suggestions include performing pyramid and partner stunts only on a spring or foam floor, grass or turf. Stunts should never be performed on hard, wet or uneven surfaces. Pyramids should not be more than two people high.

Doctor says: "Cheerleading has become extremely competitive in the past few years, incorporating more complex skills than ever before. . . . The number of catastrophic injuries continues to climb." -- Dr. Cynthia LaBella, sports medicine specialist, at Chicago's Lurie Children's Hospital and a co-author of the new policy

Cheerleader says: "They’re kind of making it too safe, taking out skills that are very exciting to do." – Kori Bronstein, 17, of Mahwah, N.J.

Report says: "Injury data for cheerleaders are not uniformly captured in the sports injury surveillance systems of state high school athletic associations, the NFHS [the National Federation of State High School Associations] and the NCAA." – Pediatrics journal last week