PITTSBURGH (AP) — Abby McDermott has grown accustomed to the looks she gets whenever she starts talking to someone about her chosen sport. The slight turn of the head. The brief pause in the conversation.
“When you say ‘acrobatics and tumbling,’ especially ‘acrobatics,’ people think of the circus,” McDermott said with a laugh.
The Duquesne graduate student gets it. It happens a lot. It wasn’t that long ago that the former artistic gymnast counted herself among the uninitiated. So she’s perfected a shorthand definition designed to turn confusion into curiosity.
“When I describe it to people, it’s cool but it’s sometimes like weird because people are like, ‘What?’” McDermott said. “Then you have to do the whole ‘Well, it’s kind of like gymnastics and kind of like cheerleading but we don’t cheer.’”
There are no balance beams or vaulting tables. No pompoms or megaphones. Just a massive foam mat rolled across an arena floor and a few dozen athletes on both sides ready to spend two hours flipping, soaring, yelling and finding joy in something that feels familiar yet is decidedly not.
It began in 2009 with a half-dozen schools searching for a way to incorporate elements of those two well-known disciplines — gymnastics and cheerleading — into a showcase for female athletes. Acro, which operates in a similar space with a more traditional cheerleading-centric approach called STUNT, has become one of the fastest-growing collegiate sports in the country.
Membership in the National Collegiate Acrobatics and Tumbling Association has risen from 14 teams a decade ago to over 50 schools representing over 1,200 athletes, including Duquesne, which made its debut earlier this month. The NCAA labeled “acro” an emerging sport in 2020. There’s a chance it could be considered for NCAA championship status as early as the 2027-28 academic year.
On the surface, acro’s ascension seems sudden and perhaps in lockstep with a spike in interest in women’s sports. The reality is it has been hiding in plain sight all along.
‘This bridged the gap’
There are currently more than 3 million girls participating in cheerleading or gymnastics (or both) in the United States. Only a small fraction, however, move on to compete collegiately.
Enter the NCATA, which promotes acro as an attractive option for athletic departments. With roster sizes that can swell to as large as 50 and low overhead — the floor mat is the only piece of equipment required — acro offers schools a chance to be better positioned for Title IX compliance while allowing athletes to extend their careers.
“There was an unmet need,” said Janell Cook, executive director of the NCATA. “This came and bridged the gap.”
Duquesne, a Catholic university that sits on a bluff overlooking downtown Pittsburgh, has an undergraduate student population that is well over 60% female. When the school began exploring adding women’s sports earlier this decade, the more athletic director Dave Harper looked into acro, the more it appeared to be “a perfect fit.”
“The goal was to not only have competitive rosters but boost our numbers on the women’s sports side,” he said. “It’s aligned well for us.”
Harper hired Michaela Soper — a former artistic gymnast who transitioned to acro after she broke her back during her senior year of high school — in the spring of 2023.
Soper cast a wide net over the next year, eventually recruiting a team of 34 athletes (nearly all of them freshmen) from 15 different states. The 120-member Dukes football team, which competes at the FCS level, features players from 18 states.
“She’s gone into places that certainly the Duquesne name is not familiar but now will be, which is fantastic,” Harper said.
‘Somebody wants me’
Growing up in the Baltimore suburbs, Soper had her sights set on becoming a college gymnast. An awkward fall on the balance beam scuttled those plans. A few months before graduation, Gannon — a small private school in Erie, Pennsylvania — reached out to see if Soper wanted to become part of its fledgling program.
“I kind of thought it was a hoax,” said Soper. “I didn’t think it was real because I hadn’t heard of it before.”
She brushed aside her initial skepticism, in part because Gannon made her feel like “somebody actually wants me.” Soper fell in love with the team aspect of a sport that requires trust above all else.
It was much the same for McDermott, by far the most experienced athlete on the Duquesne roster after four years at Glenville State in West Virginia. She’s embraced becoming a de facto assistant coach and sounding board for her freshmen-laden team. It wasn’t always that way.
“Learning to rely on someone else (in acro) was a big challenge, a big change for me,” said McDermott. “But doing it for the person next to me and not just myself really makes me work like 10 times harder.”
It also provided McDermott with an unexpected benefit: improved mental health. She was a gymnast for 15 years before getting into acro. She loved it, sure. Yet it was also an unforgiving and sometimes monotonous grind. Acro provided a jolt.
“Getting to learn a whole new sport, it was frustrating at times,” she said. “But it was also awesome. Just like on my body, my mind. Everything was so nice and refreshing.”
How it works
There are a handful of specific roles on each team, with every athlete wearing a number. “Bases” provide support through lifts or by doing backbends that allow teammates to stand on their stomachs (yes, really) while creating pyramids. “Tops” can be lifted as high as 10-15 feet in the air and then dismount by flipping or twisting into the arms of “back spots” (like something you might see at a football game). Tumblers somersault their way from one end of the mat to the other, sometimes in synchronicity with each other.
Meets are broken down into six events. The first five — compulsory, acro, pyramid, toss and tumbling — consist of multiple heats, with each heat requiring different elements. Most include at least one member of the team counting out “one, two, three, four” drill sergeant-style to create a tempo designed to keep everyone on time.
Each routine is assigned a specific start value based on its difficulty, with a max of 10.0 like in college gymnastics. The scores are added up as the meet goes along and teams go one at a time, giving it a kind of ebb and flow you might find in a traditional “ball” sport.
It ends with the team event, in which 24 athletes spend nearly 3 minutes showcasing the skills highlighted throughout the meet, all of it set to music, not unlike competitive cheerleading.
Making history
On the surface, it’s a lot. Duquesne did its best during its first-ever meet on Feb. 7 against Gannon, offering a video tutorial between every event to the hundreds in the stands, a mixture of students, alumni and families with young children.
Against a nonstop backbeat of up-tempo music (think Beyonce), the schools went back and forth, every routine ending with hugs and high-fives regardless of the result. Gannon, runner-up to NCATA national champion Baylor last spring, led through four events before the Dukes surged ahead after the tumbling portion.
When Duquesne finished off its inaugural win with a rousing shout of “Go Dukes!” during the team event, Soper — sporting a red blazer and high heels — raced to celebrate with the group she reminds regularly is making history one routine at a time.
Maybe some of them didn’t know what acro was before Soper approached them. They only knew they didn’t want their athletic careers to end, and acro allowed them to pivot.
It’s not gymnastics. It’s not cheerleading. And it’s definitely not the circus.
It is something new. Something uniquely theirs.
“Here you’re still able to find a home for yourself and a home that supports and accepts you regardless of what you look like, how talented you are,” Soper said. “There’s going to be a place on the team for athletes that love the sport and are passionate about it.”
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AP sports: https://apnews.com/sports
Will Graves, The Associated Press
