Cheer Factor

On a Friday night in February, 2,000 fans start filing into the University of Oregon’s Matthew Knight Arena for a cheerleading contest. But if you are expecting pom-poms and megaphone yells, this is not your event. These are female athletes, not sideline supporters. At least that’s what they want the NCAA to acknowledge, and there are legal implications for all college athletic programs. The new event is called acro, as in acrobatics and tumbling, and even if it has roots in traditional rah-rah cheerleading, its organizers have rebranded it to shield it from stereotypes like makeup and bare midriffs. Acro teams keep the more athletic aspects of cheerleading–the tosses, the pyramids–and ditch the go-team-go stuff. The cheers are for them, not by them.

Three schools–the University of Oregon, Azusa Pacific University and Quinnipiac University–are here to compete head to head to head. Judges score the event and pick a winner after the acro teams complete a series of gymnastics-like twists, tucks and dismounts.

With its dedicated teams, competitive format and de-emphasis of traditional measures of cheerleading success, acrobatics and tumbling, which is finishing just its second season on the college level, can comfortably call itself a women’s sport. Still, acro exists on the fringe of college athletics: the three schools at the Oregon meet account for half the nation’s college acro teams.

The fledgling sport’s size, however, belies its importance, given that acro has reignited the debate about equal access to college athletic teams decreed by Title IX, the landmark gender-equity law celebrating its 40th anniversary this June. If acrobatics and tumbling and another new sport with roots in cheerleading called stunt can be recognized under Title IX, these new forms of competitive cheer may explode as a college sport.

Since 1972, Title IX has spawned great progress for women’s athletics. Still, women don’t enjoy equal access to athletic opportunities: 252,946 men competed in NCAA sports on all levels in 2011, compared with 191,131 women. If cash-crunched athletic departments want to create additional opportunities for women, acro and stunt would seem to be an easy choice. All you really need is a mat.

It won’t be quite that easy, given that acro and stunt can’t agree on a set of rules and the courts have not fully endorsed them as Title IX sports. To make the push for Title IX recognition, Oregon joined forces with five other schools, renamed competitive cheer “acrobatics and tumbling” and aligned itself with USA Gymnastics. The governing body for cheerleading, USA Cheer, created stunt and has signed up 22 schools.

Acro is clearly more formalized. In the six acro schools, the sport is run out of the athletic department as a varsity sport. Acro is a full-time obligation. At this point, most stunt athletes are sideline cheerleaders who compete, on average, in just three regular-season stunt events. (ESPN occasionally televises a more traditional competitive-cheer event that involves the rah-rah routines.) “We’re sideline cheerleaders first, competitive cheerleaders second,” says Kristen Pirie, a cheerleader and stunt athlete at Georgia Southern University. In competition, one major difference between the two cheer versions is that stunt teams perform side by side, while acro teams perform sequentially.

In order to be granted “emerging sport” status, however, the two rivals have been asked by the NCAA to file a joint proposal. The emerging-sport stamp from the NCAA virtually assures schools that they can count acro and stunt toward Title IX compliance. Such NCAA recognition will help the sport expand. Right now, athletic departments have little incentive to create teams that may not count toward their Title IX requirements, especially for a type of sport that lost a Title IX lawsuit just two years ago.

But acro and stunt are far from united. “I think stunt is a shoddy imitation of what we created,” says Felecia Mulkey, the Oregon acro coach and a former gymnast. While acro tries to downplay the sport’s ties to cheerleading–“No, no, thank you,” one of the Oregon athletes responded at an acro practice when asked whether she ever picked up pom-poms on the sidelines–stunt embraces them.

To acro, stunt’s ties to USA Cheer are another sticking point. The board president of USA Cheer, Jeff Webb, is also founder and CEO of Varsity Brands, a $200 million company that sells cheerleading equipment and apparel and regulates and administers cheerleading events across the country. Is USA Cheer ultimately concerned with developing college athletes or with cheerleading for the bottom line of Varsity Brands? USA Cheer defends stunt’s structure. “No one has brought that up as a problem other than them,” says USA Cheer executive director Bill Seely, referring to acro’s leaders.

The groups have also taken very different approaches to Title IX. USA Cheer admits that stunt is far from ready for Title IX recognition, since it’s mostly an extracurricular activity for traditional sideline cheerleaders. Oregon and three other acro schools have counted their athletes toward Title IX. Acro’s decision to move on Title IX makes strategic sense. The sooner schools see that acro passes Title IX muster, the quicker they will field teams. Still, these schools are putting themselves at some Title IX risk.

Even if acro survives any Title IX challenges, some women’s-sports leaders aren’t rooting for competitive cheer’s success. Call it acrobatics, call it tumbling, call it stunt–it still started with pom-poms and glorifying male athletes from the sidelines. You can’t simply rename it and pretend that women have been getting equal opportunity. “It’s very difficult to belie history,” says Missy Park, founder of the Title Nine women’s-sportswear company.

Erin Buzuvis, a professor at Western New England College School of Law and co-founder of the Title IX Blog, offers a counterargument: Acro’s and stunt’s start in cheerleading is empowering. To Buzuvis, taking an activity that marginalized women and turning it into a sport that displays female competitiveness, physicality and grace is a feminist victory. “Liberal feminism–the idea that what the men get women get too–is a great start for equality,” says Buzuvis, who outlined her case in an excellent 2011 Boston College Law Review article. “But in the end, it falls short of being fully transformative. The true measure of equality comes when we choose the definition of the [sport] itself.”

And Oregon is a great example of the transformation. At this Friday-night meet in Eugene, the crowd shrieks as the Ducks take the mat for the final event of the night, the team routine. The music starts, and 24 women begin to flip, tumble and jump in near perfect synchrony. Toward the end, they all zigzag across the mat, jumping and flipping in different directions like carp in a lake. It feels like the most spirited halftime show you’ll never see, and at the end, the women come together and let out their only cheer of the night, a “Go, Ducks!” to punctuate their effort.

The crowd again goes berserk, then quiets as the judges tally the final scores. At last, the numbers flash: the Ducks have clinched a win. “O! O! O! O!” the crowd and the team chant. “So it’s not swimming,” says one Oregon acro athlete, Megan Bamford, when asked to make the case for acceptance of her sport. “So what? Tradition shouldn’t matter. It’s cool to try something new. Because then we’re making history.”