Cheerleaders

Patty Phommanyvong, a cheerleader for Marshall High School in Los Angeles, was thrust into the air while performing a stunt at a football game two years ago. The next thing anyone knew, she was limp. Her heart had stopped beating. Paramedics were called, but by the time they got her heart restarted, her brain had been deprived of oxygen for too long and she was in a coma. Experts say she may have been inadvertently struck in the chest on her descent from the stunt. Confined to a nursing home, Phommanyvong, now 19, can't eat or speak.

MORGAN HILL, Calif. - Fliers bearing an image of the wide-eyed, smiling teen are taped to every box that leaves Dutchman's Pizza, a high school hangout. Pink and yellow ribbons adorn every tree on the median strip of this quaint downtown. A local elementary school serves as a command center, where more than 600 volunteers gathered beneath clearing skies Friday to continue the search for Sierra LaMar. The 15-year-old Northern California cheerleader, law enforcement officials believe, was abducted outside her home the morning of March 16. Santa Clara County officers and FBI agents have interviewed dozens of Sierra's friends and family members.

This small city's namesake military base was decommissioned after World War II, but over the years Fort Oglethorpe, population 7,000, has retained its utilitarian, base-town ambience. Public life here unfolds on two busy four-lane thoroughfares clogged with used-car lots, fast-food joints and pawnshops. All that's missing are the troops. What Fort Oglethorpe does not lack is churches -- enough churches, in an array of Protestant flavors, to deliver salvation to brigades of sinners.

A day after human remains were found in a West Texas pasture, investigators had yet to identify them, but people couldn't help wondering whether they belonged to a missing cheerleader. Hailey Dunn, 13, disappeared more than a year ago from her Colorado City home about 100 miles southeast of Lubbock. It was still unclear late Wednesday whether the remains found Tuesday near a city-owned airport in Big Spring, about 40 miles west of Colorado City, could be Hailey's. The mother of a person of interest in the case lives in Big Spring.  At a Wednesday news conference broadcast from an airport hangar by KOSA , Big Spring Police Sgt. Tony Everett described the remains as "partially mummified and skeletal," saying it was impossible to speculate about the person's identity or sex. “An anthropologist is going to have to make that determination,” he said.

Gimme an I-R-O-N-Y!! The upcoming Super Bowl at Cowboys Stadium, home of the world's most famous cheerleaders and monument to all things poufy and glittering, will make history for a different reason. There will be no cheerleaders. The Green Bay Packers and Pittsburgh Steelers are two of the six NFL teams that do not employ cheerleaders, and the NFL said Thursday that they have no plans to bring in ringers. It will be the first time in the Super Bowl's 45 years that the game will contain no sis, no boom and no bah. "No cheerleaders this year," read the e-mailed answer from a league spokesman Thursday, bringing me to my feet.

I have sent along posters signed by the Rams cheerleaders and Raiderettes who attended the Orange County International Auto Shows. It would be my pleasure to have (Joe Bell) attend next year's auto show and will send you a friendly reminder. Hopefully, you'll find our 1991 auto show more to your liking and be more interested in seeing the cars on display than the ladies who might be working for a manufacturer. Barry Greenberg, Barry Greenberg Advertising and Public Relations Los Angeles

A group of 12 Saddleback Valley cheerleaders, headed by longtime coach Gail Wright, took first place recently in a competition organized by the Pop Warner Football League. "We did pretty well for our little group," said parent Kate Charles-Howe. The Orange Empire Conference, held in Long Beach, was special, parents say, because the girls showed extra team spirit. One 12-year-old team member was holding an extended "A mount" position when she slipped.

A University of Nevada, Reno, cheerleader has filed an extortion complaint against the squad's coach over a $500 fine levied against her for competing in an event without the coach's blessing. Nicole Archie, a senior journalism student, filed the complaint last week with UNR police against Coach Heather Soper-Wilson, the Reno Gazette-Journal reported. Archie and a male cheerleader were fined $500 apiece for competing in the National Cheerleading Assn. championships in Daytona, Fla., in April.

A network television employee has been charged with 18 counts of misdemeanor child annoying for making sexually oriented photos and videotapes of cheerleaders performing or practicing at Southern California schools, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department said Tuesday. Steven L.

Pep squad members at Mira Costa High School in Manhattan Beach seemed to have forgotten the meaning of school spirit when they voted to skip cheering at a recent football game at Centennial High School in Compton because they were concerned about their safety. And for that lapse, those who stuck to their decision had to sit out another game Friday. When Principal John Giovati heard of their decision to pass on the Oct.

Three decades ago, the Lakers had an unofficial mascot who got too big for his tuxedo. He was an entertaining fan who became so popular, he eventually wanted money to continue being that fan. The Lakers tried paying him but couldn't pay him enough to keep him happy, so he stopped coming to games and eventually faded into anonymity. Remember Dancing Barry? He's about to be joined by Clipper Darrell. The Clippers' unofficial cheerleader, the rotund dancing guy in a red and blue suit named Darrell Bailey, caused a stir this week when he issued a statement on his website claiming that the Clippers, "no longer want me to be Clipper Darrell.… I am devastated!"

At the pre-show warm-up for "Bring It On: The Musical," performers in their 20s are stretching and assuming yoga postures, others are jumping rope or jogging softly in place. It's what you might expect from any cast of a musical. Then suddenly, downstage right, there's a complicated, unfamiliar moving shape that turns out to be a man flat on his back, doing fast, full push-ups into the air with a tiny young woman standing straight on his hands. A similar surprising amalgam of styles is being seen by audiences at the Ahmanson Theatre.

— There's a lot of sugar and caffeine in the room at Studio 54, the unoccupied Broadway theater where a cast of 33 is working through a casually strenuous new dance number for "Bring It On: The Musical. " Young performers in workout clothes sip energy drinks between run-throughs; an oversized Pez dispenser modeled after Peanuts' Lucy sits on the stage manager's table. When co-composer/lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda joins a small group of observers, he offers everyone a handful of Pop Rocks.

Those who knew Angela Gettis, the 16-year-old Washington Preparatory cheerleader who collapsed during a football game Friday and later died, said cheering was not just an extracurricular activity for her. It was her life. "There is nothing in the world she enjoyed more," Principal Todd Ullah said in a statement Monday, the first day of class after her death. Classmates said Angela brought that same vitality to the hallways of the South L.A. high school. She was vibrant, funny and always one of the brightest students in class.

Can sari-clad "cheer queens" stand up to short-skirted pom-pom girls? That's a question Indian cricket fans are pondering after a team here introduced a cheerleading squad wrapped head to toe in traditional garb, its members eschewing high kicks and splits for complex hand waves and traditional dance steps. "The concept of cheer queens is an extraordinary way of showcasing our national artistic heritage to the world," says Abhijit Sarkar, director of the Pune Warriors. Others say it's a nice idea, done somewhere else.

NBA fans looking to settle bar bets or simply reminisce about their favorite team's playoff run this spring will now have to search a bit harder. When the NBA's collective bargaining agreement expired, not only the players were locked out. A wrinkle within that agreement meant that NBA teams' websites and nba.com had to remove most images, videos and other likenesses of current players. Fans now see pages advertising a team, but no stories about the players on that team. Cheerleaders and auditions for cheerleaders are featured on some websites, but no stars.

The high school football season has come to a close, but there is no rest for the cheerleading squad at Van Nuys High School. The 15-member squad still practices five days a week, 2 1/2 hours a day to perfect their tumbles, flips and tosses. Is this some kind of punishment? No, it's a reward for being so good. Last month the squad took first place for the second straight year in the citywide Universal Cheerleading Assn.'s regional competition.

Cheerleaders are rare in professional ice hockey. Ice-skating cheerleaders, unheard of. So imagine our surprise when we bumped into the figure-skating cheerleaders for Disney's Mighty Ducks practicing at the Culver City Ice Arena this week. What a wholesome contrast to the game's occasional slug fests, we thought. Wonder what they'll wear? "Uh, I can't tell you anything about the Decoys," said a young woman in the Anaheim team's marketing department.

A convicted drunk driver pleaded not guilty to murder Wednesday in the death of an Irvine cheerleader killed over Memorial Day weekend as she rode home from a party with friends. Dressed in a jail-issued jumpsuit, Austin Jeffrey Farley, 26, of Irvine stood with two defense attorneys as a judge read the charges accusing him of murder, driving under the influence of alcohol and causing injury. Farley is accusing of slamming his pickup truck into a Mercedes-Benz early Sunday, killing Ashton Sweet, 14, a freshman at Northwood High School.

Students at Northwood High School in Irvine came to class Tuesday wearing white as a tribute to cheerleader Ashton Sweet, injured in a Memorial Day weekend crash involving a suspected drunk driver. Those students, amid tears, learned hours later that Ashton had been removed from life support and died. The 14-year-old freshman and three other teenage girls were being taken home very early Sunday from a birthday party for one of them. About 1 a.m., the Mercedes-Benz they were riding in, driven by Michael Ghaemi, the father of one of the girls, was hit in the left side by a Toyota pickup near Culver Drive and Irvine Boulevard, according to police.