Acrobatics & tumbling is the next big thing in womens college sports

Editor’s note: This is part of a series in which The Athletic highlights offbeat sports you may not have known are contested at the college level. Follow the full series here.

On May 3, just a few days after the Baylor women’s acrobatics & tumbling program won its eighth consecutive national championship, “SportsCenter” showed a clip of Jordan Gruendler and Bayley Humphrey, two Bears standouts, blatantly defying the laws of physics.

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Competing in an acro portion of the championship event, Humphrey steadily held Gruendler over her head, then balanced her teammate’s entire body using one hand while Gruendler contorted herself into various gravity-defying positions. The stunned ESPN anchors could only guffaw at the feats of strength they were witnessing.

The clip, which made the rounds on Twitter that week, was now beamed to the broader world of sports fans, many of whom had never heard of acro & tumbling, let alone set eyes on its wizardry.

"SO THIS HAPPENED" IS RIGHT. WE MADE IT ON SPORTSCENTER!🤩#SicEm🐻 @theNCATA pic.twitter.com/nsWgH7SrG7

— Baylor A&T (@BaylorAcroTumb) May 3, 2023

“I will admit, this made me a little emotional,” Baylor A&T head coach Felecia Mulkey tweeted about the segment. “These women work hard and deserve recognition.”

It illustrated just how far A&T has come since 2008, when Mulkey drove across the country with her two dachshunds, a lifelong Georgia girl moving to Oregon to coach a sport that didn’t even exist.

In the most basic sense, A&T is a combination of gymnastics and competitive cheerleading.

“And when we say gymnastics, we’re talking about artistic gymnastics, which is what you watch in the Olympics, along with power tumbling and then acrobatic gymnastics, which is what you see in Cirque du Soleil,” Mulkey said. “A&T is the evolution of those disciplines and the athletic aspects of cheerleading.”

There are no pompoms or knife-pleated skirts in A&T, but the sport was born out of competitive cheerleading and even a bit of controversy. In 2003, the University of Maryland announced plans to create an all-female competitive cheerleading team that would operate as an officially recognized NCAA sport, as opposed to the traditional cheerleading and dance squads that perform on the sideline of football and basketball games and fall under the marketing arm of collegiate athletic departments. Proponents of Maryland’s decision presented it as a new varsity sport providing added opportunities for female athletes; critics argued it was an easy, less-expensive way for Maryland to inflate its female scholarship numbers and fulfill Title IX requirements.

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Regardless, the movement developed into A&T, although it took a few years to find its footing and its way to Mulkey, who was the marketing director and cheerleading coach for Kennesaw State, her alma mater, at the time.

“I was a terrible cheerleading coach. Terrible,” she said. “We would get technical fouls during basketball games for heckling the other team. But we competed and were successful as a competitive cheer team.”

In the summer of 2007, the University of Oregon followed Maryland’s lead and announced its own intentions to make competitive cheer a varsity sport, which was redubbed “team stunts and gymnastics.” Mulkey was desperate to start something similar at Kennesaw State, so she cold-called Oregon, looking for advice. That eventually turned into a job interview and an offer to become the head coach of the Ducks’ new program.

With only a handful of similar collegiate programs sprouting up, Mulkey was building a roster while also on the frontlines of building out the entire sport, on and off the mat. She and the other early coaches determined the rules, regulations and how the meets were organized and scored. They had to figure out what the athletes would wear and convince other universities to start programs. Everything was brand new. “Acrobatics & tumbling” wasn’t even adopted until 2011.

“I spent my entire first year explaining to people what we were doing,” Mulkey said.

Baylor coach Felecia Mulkey has coached the championship-winning team each year since 2011. (Courtesy of Baylor Athletics)

It’s why the origins of A&T are so unique. The sport has borrowed from other disciplines and competitions, providing some degree of shorthand, but A&T is also the only varsity collegiate program other than football that was founded at the college level, as opposed to developing from the youth or professional ranks. Mulkey and her early-days colleagues were pioneers.

“Because it was created at the collegiate level, we could shape it through every lens,” said Janell Cook, who has served as executive director of the National Collegiate Acrobatics & Tumbling Association (NCATA) since 2014. “Through an athletic director’s perspective, a coach’s perspective, a fan’s perspective, and also bringing in the positive elements of other sports and how they’ve evolved, all while making something new.”

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The sport grew steadily. The NCATA was formed in the summer of 2010, with the first formalized season of competition occurring in the 2010-11 school year. What started as just a few programs — Maryland, Oregon, Baylor, Quinnipiac, Fairmont State and Azusa Pacific — quickly became a dozen, then 20, then 30 and is now approaching 60 across the country at the Division I through III levels.

There were bumps along the way, such as Maryland dropping the sport (along with several others) in 2012, but the potential was quickly evident. Five schools were represented at the 2013 NCATA championship. The following year, there were 14. Mulkey — whose Oregon team won both of those titles — remembers standing on the mat and crying in 2014.

“I was looking at all of these women whose dreams were coming true,” she said. “It was totally cheesy, but come on. Fourteen schools? That was a surreal moment.”

Motivation for the growth varied. At the Division I level, most schools added A&T to help fulfill Title IX scholarship requirements. Division II and III schools used it as an enrollment enticement. Yet despite the Title IX battles the sport was forced to fight in the early going, trailblazing for women in college athletics — in a sport with significant, widespread interest — was always at its core.

“I never thought about it failing. That never occurred to me because it was meeting this interest and ability. There are tens of thousands of young women graduating from high school every year who have been in cheerleading or different areas of gymnastics, and it really bottlenecks,” Mulkey said. “You have, what, 85 women’s gymnastics programs at the collegiate level? There are only 12 to 15 people on each roster. Cheerleading isn’t supported like a varsity athletics program at most schools. But our recruiting base is as big, if not bigger than football and basketball.”

Present-day DI A&T rosters average around 45 athletes, with a maximum equivalency of 14 scholarships per team (similar to baseball and softball). Meets last 90-120 minutes and consist of six heats and a halftime period. Each heat highlights different disciplines, from the Cirque du Soleil-worthy acro stunts that pop up on “SportsCenter” to tosses and tumbling, to the final team event that features the organized chaos of 24 athletes performing synchronized A&T skills to music. For each heat, the opposing team takes the mat first as the home team watches, then answers. Officials tally the scores from each heat to determine a winner, like a track meet. The whole thing unfolds like a two-hour choreographed acrobatic boxing match.

“It’s kind of made-for-TV, too, with these natural breaks in between each heat, but that was accidental,” said Mulkey, who added that for most A&T schools, meets have become either the second- or third-highest-attended female sport on campus, behind women’s basketball and/or volleyball.

Baylor has won eight NCATA championships. (Courtesy of Baylor Athletics)

Mulkey — or Coach Fee, as she’s known throughout the sport — has been integral to all of it. The NCATA has held 12 A&T national championships dating back to 2011; Mulkey has won every single one of them, the first four at Oregon and the last eight at Baylor, which hired her away from the Ducks in 2014. During her dominant journey to become the John Wooden of acro & tumbling, Mulkey has also served as the NCATA’s director of expansion on a volunteer basis.

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“She’s meant everything to (A&T),” said Cook, an Oregon alum and former athletics staffer. “She can sell pretty much anyone on it. It’s been incredibly valuable to have her as someone who can talk about the creation of the sport and how it could fit into an athletic department. She’s really been the engine that keeps moving the sport forward.”

Much of the work Cook and Mulkey have done over the years has focused on securing an NCAA emerging women’s sport designation, which A&T was finally awarded in 2020, earning it official recognition as an NCAA-sanctioned sport. (Women’s equestrian, rugby and wrestling have the same status.) A sport must have at least 20 programs competing at the varsity or club level to apply for “emerging sport” status; the next step is for A&T to cross the threshold of 40 competing schools in order to be stamped with NCAA championship status. With several programs entering their initial recruitment season in 2023-24, A&T hopes to earn championship designation in 2025.

“We still have to educate people about A&T, but now people know about it too, they’re reaching out to us,” Mulkey said. “Getting past this next hurdle to championship status, I think we’re going to grow exponentially.”

It’s already taking root at the youth level. For the first time this past spring, USA Gymnastics worked with the NCATA to put on an A&T youth invitational. It was held in conjunction with the NCATA’s eight-team college championship bracket in West Liberty, W.Va., where the youth squads were also invited to perform during halftime of the college meets.

“It was super emotional watching these girls who were coming out on the mats to perform, then watching their awe and amazement at the college athletes doing the same thing,” Cook said. “Seeing the influx of kids who are starting profiles on Instagram that are A&T pages, those are things we just didn’t see in the past. We still have a lot of educating to do, but it’s cool to be recognized more and more.”

(Top photo courtesy of Baylor Athletics)

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