At Baylor University’s Ferrell Center, athletes on the Acrobatics and Tumbling team spend hours perfecting lifts, flips, and tumbling passes. The Bears are preparing for another competition season beginning this week, and their pursuit of an 11th straight National Collegiate Acrobatics and Tumbling Association title.
Last month, the NCAA voted to approve the sport for National Championship status.
Baylor Head Coach Felicia Mulkey helped create the sport. The vote comes after nearly two decades of work by Mulkey and other founding coaches.
"We stuck with it for so long. 18 years of the goalpost moving, people telling us no, people saying it’s never going to happen," she told KWBU after the vote. "It's just so validating."
Mulkey said the sport was created to give athletes who trained in gymnastics and cheerleading a true collegiate platform.
"We wanted to create an opportunity for women who had trained in this skill set their entire lives to showcase it at the collegiate level," she said.
Acrobatics and Tumbling combines elements of cheer, gymnastics and strength-based sports, like powerlifting and diving. Teams compete in six events, including tumbling, pyramid, and team routines.
The sport was officially recognized in 2020 under the NCAA’s Emerging Sports for Women program, which is designed to expand athletic opportunities for female athletes at the collegiate level. Since inclusion in the Emerging Sports program, 52 schools across all three NCAA divisions now sponsor an Acrobatics and Tumbling team – up from 37 just two years ago.
"I think we just really haven’t slowed down," Mulkey said of that growth. "Every school that adds [Acrobatics & Tumbling] is 40 new opportunities for women."
And, she said, more schools are expected to announce new Acrobatics and Tumbling teams in the coming months.
Ahead of the decision, Senior base Meredith Wells said the recognition from the NCAA would validate years of work by athletes and coaches across the country.
"Cheer and gymnastics have always had to fight for recognition, so for acrobatics and tumbling to be recognized by the NCAA is awesome," Wells said.
Mulkey, who currently serves as the Director for Expansion for National Collegiate Acrobatics and Tumbling Association, says it's still unclear what changes will come with the NCAA championship announcement. For right now, the NCAA will watch how competition runs and make decisions for next season.
While they wait, Mulkey said the plan is to compete this season as normal and keep working to grow the sport.
"We’ll just keep growing and getting bigger and impacting more lives," Mulkey said.
While the 2026 season starts this month, the first NCAA championship will not take place until the 2027 season.
Got a tip? Email Molly-Jo Tilton at Molly-jo_tilton@baylor.edu.
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