USA Cheer announced that STUNT had applied for emerging sport status. I thought that NCATA was doing the same for Acrobatics and Tumbling. Can someone explain the differences, legitimacy etc? There are more schools with STUNT but schools I am more familiar with such as Oregon and Baylor have A&T. I realize that Quinnipiac has A&T as a result of a lawsuit several years ago but there does seem to be a lot of growth in NCATA.
My daughter is a high school senior and has committed to a college to do A&T so I really am curious about these 2 programs that seems to compete directly against each other.
Anyone with insights?
As a former collegiate cheerleader and stunt athlete, I have some thoughts. I’m only going to focus on the college level.
A&T and Stunt definitely are direct competitors. I believe A&T came first and Stunt was Varsity’s answer to it.
Stunt is much more similar to cheerleading in the sense of stunting. There’s traditional 4 person stunt groups and similar pyramids you’d see from your average college cheer team. There are four quarters (partner stunts, pyramids and baskets, jumps and tumbling, and group) and premade routines that each team learns prior from competition varying from easy (routine 1) to hard (routine 6). There are 6 routines EACH for 3 quarters, the stunt, pyramid, and tumbling quarters for a total of 18 routines. The last quarter, the group has to perform all of the routines of that level, side by side next to the other team, at the same time. I’m not going to get too into how Stunt works, that’s all on their website and can be easily watched online.
The point is, you learn the routines varsity tells you to learn. And the skills are similar to traditional competitive cheer, but you have 3 panels and the other team has 3 panels and you’re going at the same time.
In Acro and tumbling, there are 6 rounds: compulsory, partner stunts, pyramids, tosses, tumbling, and group. In compulsory, teams compete the same skills, although one at a time. In the other rounds, teams compete the best skills they can. Similar to a gymnastics meet in the sense they’re scored on difficulty and execution. However, the skills and group routine are a bit different from traditional cheer skills. But one team gets all the mats at a time, scored on difficulty and execution.
Having competed stunt, I’m actually more partial to Acro and Tumbling. It’s very obnoxious have to learn routines as opposed to putting out skills your team is confident in. Plus having both teams go at the same time makes judging difficult. The judges sit relatively close, and if both teams hit, it’s very very subjective to pick a winner.
Plus most STUNT teams are usually the schools cheer team. Schools may list as having separate teams, but there’s definitely A LOT of overlap and almost always the same coaches. (I can’t back this up with rosters, but this was the case when I was competing). So it’s really just like a new way for existing cheerleaders to compete, tbh.
I don’t have experience with A&T, but it seems like it’s more respected and more serious than Stunt. They’re treated like athletes, and not cheerleaders in volleyball uniforms.
However, due to varsity’s influence, I feel Stunt may overtake Acro. I have a lot of feelings and knowledge on this, so if you have more specific questions, feel free to ask because this is a big jumble of information.
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