PITTSBURGH >> Abby McDermott has grown accustomed to the looks she gets whenever she starts talking to someone about her chosen sport. The slight turn of the head. The brief pause in the conversation.

“When you say ‘acrobatics and tumbling,’ especially ‘acrobatics,’ people think of the circus,” McDermott said with a laugh.

The Duquesne graduate student gets it. It happens a lot. It wasn’t that long ago that the former artistic gymnast counted herself among the uninitiated. So she’s perfected a shorthand definition designed to turn confusion into curiosity.

“When I describe it to people, it’s cool but it’s sometimes like weird because people are like, ‘What?’” McDermott said. “Then you have to do the whole ‘Well, it’s kind of like gymnastics and kind of like cheerleading but we don’t cheer.’”

There are no balance beams or vaulting tables. No pompoms or megaphones. Just a massive foam mat rolled across an arena floor and a few dozen athletes on both sides ready to spend two hours flipping, soaring, yelling and finding joy in something that feels familiar yet is decidedly not.

It began in 2009 with a half-dozen schools searching for a way to incorporate elements of those two well-known disciplines — gymnastics and cheerleading — into a showcase for female athletes. Acro, which operates in a similar space with a more traditional cheerleading-centric approach called STUNT, has become one of the fastest-growing collegiate sports in the country.

Membership in the National Collegiate Acrobatics and Tumbling Association has risen from 14 teams a decade ago to over 50 schools representing over 1,200 athletes, including Duquesne, which made its debut earlier this month. The NCAA labeled “acro” an emerging sport in 2020. There’s a chance it could be considered for NCAA championship status as early as the 2027-28 academic year.

On the surface, acro’s ascension seems sudden and perhaps in lockstep with a spike in interest in women’s sports. The reality is it has been hiding in plain sight all along.

“This bridged the gap”

There are currently more than 3 million girls participating in cheerleading or gymnastics (or both) in the United States. Only a small fraction, however, move on to compete collegiately.

Enter the NCATA, which promotes acro as an attractive option for athletic departments. With roster sizes that can swell to as large as 50 and low overhead — the floor mat is the only piece of equipment required — acro offers schools a chance to be better positioned for Title IX compliance while allowing athletes to extend their careers.

“There was an unmet need,” said Janell Cook, executive director of the NCATA. “This came and bridged the gap.”

Duquesne, a Catholic university that sits on a bluff overlooking downtown Pittsburgh, has an undergraduate student population that is well over 60% female. When the school began exploring adding women’s sports earlier this decade, the more athletic director Dave Harper looked into acro, the more it appeared to be “a perfect fit.”