updated 9:28 a.m. ET March 9, 2006

ST. LOUIS - A group that sets standards for cheerleading safety wants new restrictions on certain stunts through the end of this basketball season, citing a Southern Illinois University cheerleader’s 15-foot fall onto her head last weekend.

The American Association of Cheerleading Coaches and Administrators’ advisory came just a day after the Missouri Valley Conference, which includes SIU, barred its cheerleaders from certain aerial or towering stunts during its women’s basketball tournament, which begins Thursday.

Both moves were reactions to Sunday’s nationally televised scare involving Kristi Yamaoka, who late in the MVC title game suffered a concussion and a fractured neck when she fell about 15 feet onto her head from the top of a pyramid formation. Yamaoka, 18, was released Tuesday from a hospital.

With Yamaoka escaping serious injury, “we dodged a bullet. We don’t want to have another situation like that,” Jim Lord, the cheerleading group’s executive director, said Wednesday.

Though the group has no enforcement power, its executive committee has recommended, effective immediately, that college conferences do what the MVC already has done: bar their basketball cheerleaders from basket tosses — the throwing of a cheerleader into the air — and high pyramids without the use of a mat.

Lord says cheerleaders likely would not have time to drag mats on and off the court during tournaments without delaying the games. “The end result is they’re not going to be able to do” those stunts, he said.

The NCAA, NAIA and other basketball tournaments require that cheerleading teams conform to American Association of Cheerleading Coaches and Administrators safety guidelines.

The group’s rules committee will consider making its recommendations permanent when it meets April 20. The MVC also will revisit in May whether to extend its own ban, that league’s commissioner said Tuesday.

Some schools already have taken action. The University of Nebraska outlawed its cheerleaders from doing pyramids, tumbling and basket tosses after a member of its spirit squad, Tracy Jensen, was paralyzed in 1996 after breaking her neck practicing a handspring.

The Nebraska case underscored that cheerleading injuries often may expose the university and insurers to legal liability: Jensen’s lawsuit against her school resulted in a $2.1 million settlement in 2001. Insurers already had covered hundreds of thousands of dollars in her medical expenses.

In January, a former San Jose State University cheerleader paralyzed in a 2004 accident sued that school and a cheerleading coach, accusing them of reckless disregard for her safety.

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Rechelle Sneath was an 18-year-old freshman when, according to her lawsuit, the coach directed her and her teammates to deviate from a routine they had practiced previously and instead try two consecutive “back-tuck basket toss maneuvers,” a more-complex maneuver they’d never tried.

Sneath alleges that after she fell and complained she couldn’t move her legs, the coach moved her legs back and forth in an attempt to help. Doctors later determined that Sneath fractured a vertebra in the accident.

At North Carolina’s Duke University, Tuesday’s recommendation by Long’s group won’t affect Blue Devils cheerleaders — they’ve not been allowed to do anything but routine tumbling since the mid-1980s, said Chris Kennedy, Duke’s senior associate athletics director.

Kennedy said those limitations followed accidents elsewhere, including a 1985 fall by a junior varsity cheerleader at nearby UNC-Chapel Hill.

“For straight cheerleading, we will not be doing lifts or stunts,” he said. “We’re not going to change. That’s the way it is.”

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