ST. LOUIS (AP) – A national cheerleading safety group is calling for the suspension of certain aerial and towering stunts during this year’s college basketball tournaments in response to a cheerleader’s frightening fall from a 15-foot human pyramid.

The injured cheerleader’s coach on Wednesday criticized the action – which essentially bars cheerleaders from performing the high-flying tricks that many squads have been doing for years – as “devastating” and unnecessary.

Effective immediately, the American Association of Cheerleading Coaches and Administrators recommended college conferences bar basket tosses and high pyramids without a mat. But cheerleaders would not likely have time to haul the mats around during tournament games, meaning they would have to omit those routines.

While the association has no enforcement power, the NCAA, NAIA and other basketball tournaments require cheerleading teams to conform to its guidelines. And squads are likely to comply, since conferences could kick cheerleading teams out of games for breaking the rules.

“It’d be an unwise move for a coach or others to go against the committee,” Jim Lord, the cheerleading group’s executive director, said Wednesday.

On Tuesday, the Missouri Valley Conference barred its cheerleaders from such stunts during its women’s basketball tournament, which begins Thursday. The MVC includes Southern Illinois University, whose nationally televised conference title game Sunday came to a halt when cheerleader Kristi Yamaoka lost her balance, toppled the wrong way off the human pyramid and landed on her head.

The 18-year-old sophomore had a concussion and cracked vertebra in her neck, but gave a thumbs-up after she was strapped to a backboard and cheered with her arms as her school’s band struck up its fight song. She was released Tuesday from a hospital.

With Yamaoka escaping serious injury, “we dodged a bullet,” Lord said. “We don’t want to have another situation like that.”

SIU’s cheerleading coach, Jennifer Graeff, said that while her squad will comply with the restrictions, she questioned their necessity after what she called Yamaoka’s “unfortunate accident” doing a formation she said is routinely done thousands of times a year.

Graeff said her colleagues across the country are upset and hoping the rule will not stand.

“Other coaches are angry, saying this is ridiculous,” she said. “If a basketball player dunks and breaks an ankle, are they going to say you can’t dunk?”

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 ban.

Many schools already have their own rules against aerial stunts.

The University of Nebraska, for instance, outlawed flips, pyramids and other stunts after cheerleader Tracy Jensen was paralyzed in 1996 from a fall while practicing handsprings. She sued the school and settled for $2.1 million settlement in 2001.

And in January, a former San Jose State University cheerleader sued that school and a coach, alleging that she was paralyzed in 2004 in a fall after her squad was told to deviate from a routine.

The new restrictions won’t affect Duke, where cheerleaders have not been allowed to do anything but routine tumbling since the mid-1980s.

Chris Kennedy, Duke’s senior associate athletics director, said those limitations followed accidents elsewhere, including a 1985 fall by a 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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On the Net:

American Association of Cheerleading Coaches and Administrators, http://www.aacca.org