Naomi Girson | staff writer

Duquesne’s inaugural acrobatics and tumbling team has yet to appear at an official meet, but it’s already making waves.

Duquesne has already earned a pre-season rank of No. 15 from the National Collegiate Acrobatics & Tumbling Association. With 47 programs in the NCAA, no other school has received a rank that high in their debut acro and tumbling season.

Duquesne Head Coach Michaela Soper is pleased with the rank, but doesn’t want the number to shake the team before they begin.

“Well, they’ve done a fantastic job pre-season so far, but ultimately it’s an earning that they have to go out there and they have to earn it,” Soper said. “They’ve been looked at by their peers, they see their potential, and they have a lot of potential, but the work starts now.”

Officially, that may be true, but Soper has been working since May of 2023 to build her team. Through her, all 33 women were recruited through a myriad of athletic activities, including power tumbling, acrobatic gymnastics and competitive cheerleading. With the variety of particular skill sets, Soper has curated her team to be well equipped all across the board for their first season on the mat.

Soper has been active in the sport for over seven years, but acro and tumbling is a relatively new sport in the collegiate world. It was not officially recognized by the NCAA until Aug. 1, 2020, according to the National Collegiate Acrobatics & Tumbling Association.

The new sport was created with the intention of giving more female athletes a chance to compete at a college level. Acro and tumbling have similarities to gymnastics, and especially to competitive cheer, but it differs in the technicality of skills.

Soper and her assistant coach Nikki Pizzi have worked together to choreograph their routines, having clusters of girls conduct complicated group stunts, while others do individual passes across the mat with their more specialized floor work.

Freshman Abigail Eberle was an all star cheerleader for 13 years in Freeport, before pursuing the opportunity to compete in acro and tumbling at Duquesne. The two sports have their crossover but differ in rudimentary ways, according to her.

“It’s a lot more technique based, a lot more body control, stuff like that. The tumbling is pretty similar, but the scoring is definitely a lot different [from cheer],” Eberle said.

The meets feature events showing the different specialties the women offer, which culminates in the team event, a high energy 2-minute 45-second routine with 28 women on the mat.
 Pizzi said the scoring for the meets is similar to gymnastics scoring. The start value for the score maxes out depending upon the difficulty of the routine. So, depending on how hard the routine is, they may know they can’t get a high score of 10.

But choosing a less-complicated routine has its benefits, making it more attainable to earn the maximum score possible.

“We always harp with ‘the clean team wins.’ You can throw a crazy skill and fall, and we could do a less crazy skill and hit, and we’re gonna win,” Pizzi said.

There is a strategy to use the scoring to the team’s advantage, giving individual women who feel more confident in their skills and consistencies higher levels of difficulty when they go out and perform, but everyone is still fine-tuning the routines and the team’s chemistry.

“I definitely think that they’re ready, and it’s for them to just get that experience and really understand what it’s like to compete on our home turf, with a crowd for the very, very first time, with a team of primarily freshmen,” Pizzi said.

Though the meets have opponents, Soper pointed out how different the relationship is in acro and tumbling from traditional sports. Neither team is ever on “defense,” per se, they each have their own time on the mat and then get to see their competition from the sidelines.

“There’s no moment where you’re having to block your opponent. In a way, with our sport being young, there’s a lot of empowerment that goes into that,” Soper said. “You don’t always want your opponent to do great, but you do your routine, they do their routine, and whoever has the better day is gonna come out on top.”

In her experience it has been rewarding to cheer on their opponents, as opposed to duking it out with them.

Eberle said that she didn’t feel any support when she did cheer in high school, but the void has been filled by Duquesne’s enthusiasm for the new team, and their pre-season rank.

“It’s really special to have that support here, school wide, everybody is coming in to support us, which is really nice. And it’s a really great feeling,” Eberle said. “We just found out maybe an hour ago when they posted [the ranking], and our entire team was celebrating together.”

The acro and tumbling team has their first meet against Gannon University on Friday night at Cooper Fieldhouse.