It was quiet, all of a sudden, when they stepped onto the mat. It tends to be when history is being made.

For Angelica Martin and Cassidy Cu, though, it was all about the history they’d already made. They knew these mats like the backs of their hands, and these skills like they knew how to walk. They needed to as they were debuting a skill combination that had never been competed before in the history of acrobatics and tumbling.

No pressure.

Martin’s parents, who had flown from Delaware to Eugene to watch their daughter compete, sat in the first available row in front of the mats at Matthew Knight Arena. Draped over the tarp that separated them from the judges was a canvas banner that read in neon yellow letters, “ANGELICA #59 SCOOO DUCKS.” 

Right behind them were Cu’s parents, who flew from their home in the Bay Area for the first (but not last) time this season.

As the meet came out of its commercial break, Pitbull’s “Don’t Stop the Party” echoed off the metal rafters of a mostly-empty arena. 

“Y’all having a good time out there?”

“¡Que no pare la fiesta!” (don’t stop the party).

The sound dimmed. Martin and Cu jogged onto the mat. The cheers rose, then fell away.

What happened next had never before been done in acrobatics and tumbling competition — although the two athletes had built it, piece by piece, over a decade. It took months of training that followed years of dedication. The athletes, who had traveled thousands of miles before landing in Eugene, were participants in a growing sport. Their parents, their coaches and their teammates had enabled them to make history; theirs was a journey that had goals stamped in the history books.

Their skill, a reverse planche with a slide-to-split, was about to become the first to be performed in acrobatics and tumbling history. It’s a combination of techniques they’d learned as acrobatic gymnasts, combined and submitted together for the first time in collegiate history.

All they had to do when they stepped on the mat was what they’d done for years: execute.

SECTION 1: BEFORE

Before they made history, though, they had to make it to Eugene. Before they made it to Eugene, the sport had to make it there. Before the sport made it there (just barely), they had to be born and raised with the necessary dedication.

Gymnastics has been part of the Martins’ lives for a while. They’ve been driving Angelica to practice for years. They know how the world of acrobatic gymnastics works, and their house reflects that.

Angelica’s been training as a gymnast since age four. In middle school ,she started practicing five days a week. She never complained, her father, Joe Martin said.

“She’s a self-motivator,” he said. “I think a lot of that comes from the sport — you look at the other girls, and they have that same characteristic: very focused on what they need to get done.”

Those five-days-a-week are when she began to learn the “slide-to-split” — a skill where the athlete, hoisting a teammate above their head, drops to one knee before sliding both legs into a split. It holds a high level of difficulty, not only because of the split skill, but also because the athlete’s stability and balance becomes exponentially more difficult when they leave their feet.

Martin performed it at the USA Gymnastics Championships in 2021, where she placed seventh.

Neither Joe Martin nor his wife, Dr. Lisa Martin, were collegiate athletes (he played intramurals; she did dance). They didn’t have experience with the inside of collegiate athletics. It didn’t matter — their daughter would figure it out.

“This whole thing was new to us as well,” Joe said. “But the fact that she took to it (the sport)…the type of parents we are, we should always support her 100 percent.”

That’s why it was a no-brainer for him to go to a local print shop and buy the banner he’d bring to Eugene for Angelica’s first meet. Of course they were going to be there — it was a foregone conclusion. The banner folded up neatly into his travel bag.

“As a father,” Joe said. “It’s difficult to have your child so far away…I’m used to being able to be there. That’s not the case here — it takes us at least a whole day to travel. You pick up on your faith, and God, and trust that everything’s going to work out. I’ve always felt that this was where she was supposed to be.”

Travel days be damned, nothing was going to stop the Martin family from showing up at Matthew Knight Arena and sitting in the first row.

Just behind them was the Cu family (in the third row, a little to the right). They’re a little closer to home; it’s an hour and a half or so on the flight from the Bay Area that they’ve taken three times this season to come see Cassidy. It’s worth it every time, they say.

“It’s still scary, as a parent, watching them do their skills,” her father, John Cu, said.

He’s watched his daughter practice and compete with a broken bone, and with whiplash. None of it stopped her.

“She’s very competitive,” her mother, Shirley Cu, said. “She keeps it internally, but she’s very competitive. She’s got that fire in her.”

The world of acrobatics and tumbling is small, in their experience. There’s very few “elite” (John’s words) acrobatic gymnasts in the nation. 

“We all know each other,” he said. “And the parents know each other.”

They’ll fly from the Bay Area to Eugene and inevitably see someone they know headed to the meet. When they traveled for Oregon’s meet against Baylor, it was top Bethany Glick’s parents. Next, it’s top/tumbler Carly Garcia’s mother.

They run into Oregon base Bella Swarthout all the time. Just after she was recruited, the family says, they’d find each other at tournaments and take pictures together. It’s a small sport. It’s a small world.

But sometimes, for the Cus, the world is big. Cassidy was a sophomore in high school when she traveled to Azerbaijan, where the 2022 World Acrobatic Gymnastics Championships were held.

Her parents couldn’t be in the stands — coronavirus restrictions left them in a nearby hotel lounge with all of the American team parents, watching their daughter win the gold medal on Azerbaijani television. 

That was where she performed a reverse planche. The skill shares a name with a type of wine bottle holder — what the two have in common is an off-center center of mass to establish balance. 

Cu’s body, held in the Azerbaijani air by two American teammates, bends into a curve — backwards from where her hands press against her teammates’, and then bends 180 degrees into an opposite, horizontal line from the hips down. 

“They were performing one by one,” John said. “We saw everything from there. When she won gold, we were jumping up and down.”

“We were jumping and hugging,” Shirley said. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’”

Both sets of parents remember driving away from their kids on drop-off day before the first day of freshman camp at Oregon. Both Angelica and Cassidy handled it better than their parents did, their families said.

“It was rough, for me,” Shirley said. “It was very emotional — it’s great that she’s independent, but, you know, it sucks for us as parents.”

The Martins thought they were ready, too. They’d heard about empty nest syndrome, and they talked to Angelica the week before they dropped her off about it.

“‘We’re gonna say goodbye, and we’re not gonna see you for a long time,’” Lisa told her daughter. “And we told her then that there will be a moment — the last moment, where we say goodbye.”

The moment that stuck with her, though, wasn’t the goodbye. It was when she saw Angelica with other freshmen at Oregon’s recruitment weekend. She saw that she had friends — great ones, Lisa said. It made it a little easier.

“I’m thinking, ‘Birds of a feather really do fly together,’” she said.

SECTION 2: THE WORK

The two athletes didn’t have to wait long for a challenge. Oregon head coach Taylor Susnara brought them together early, they said. 

They’d been working together on the basics of the sport even before they started the skill — at freshman practices, which start daily at 8:00 AM before fall quarter in September.

On one of those September days, Susnara asked if any of the athletes had ever done a slide-to-split skill before. Two of the crowd raised their hands.

“She (Susnara) just put us together,” Cu said. “And then so, when she was talking about learning the slide, she’s like, ‘Well, we’re already working together (Martin and I), so let’s try it.’”

After one of the team’s lift days at the Casanova Center, Susnara brought the two across the paved courtyard that lies in the shadow of Autzen Stadium to the Moshofsky Center, which houses an indoor football field. They began to work.

“It started off…badly, at first,” Martin says.

But it evolved. A hand-to-hand press (a skill where one athlete is inverted above another in a handstand, balanced on the bottom athlete’s hands) was pushed higher and higher into the air. Eventually, they added the reverse planche and slide-to-split that became the combination on the mats that they compete in-season. It took time, but it was working.

Part of that growth was the community, they said. Swarthout and Cu are still close.

“I grew up kind of watching Cassidy and being acquainted (with her), and I love her to my core,” Swarthout said. “She is so awesome. She’s so amazing. And I think that just as a whole, Cassidy is just a really fun person to be around, and I really enjoy working with her.”

After she committed to Oregon, Cu would spend time at Swarthout’s house and gym. Swarthout taught her “the basics,” Cu said — the skills that she’d have spent the first few weeks at Oregon learning.

When she showed up, she had a head start.

“She was low-key my mentor,” Cu said.

Just before the two athletes headed home for winter break, Susnara put the skill in as Oregon’s five-element acro submission.

Finally, it was time.

SECTION THREE: MEET DAY

By the time the two athletes jogged onto the silent mat against Morgan State University on Feb. 15, it could’ve been a formality. It wasn’t — not yet.

With her feet set apart, Martin formed a firm base in the middle of the mat. Cu stepped onto Martin’s right thigh, then onto her left shoulder. Suddenly, she was nearly six feet above the ground.

Then came what she called “the most nerve-wracking part”: the extended hand-in-hand press. Cu’s hands locked with Martin’s, and she kicked her legs from shoulder to above her head, into the inversion. The two locked eyes, too.

“Here, I’m pretty calm. I’m feeling pretty good, you know, arms squeezing,” Martin said, watching the skill back afterward.

They knew what would happen next. Cu entered the reverse planche. Her back bent at an impossible angle. The silence began to lift, and a roar began to build from the stands.

Now, it’s Martin’s turn. With Cu in the planche, she went down to a knee. She slid her foot away to complete the slide-to-split. She felt something different.

The sole of her shoe was caught on the tape line. She couldn’t push her foot all the way, not with it stuck like that.

“I’m like, ‘Dang,’” Martin said. “‘I don’t really know what’s going on.’ Honestly, the only thing in my mind was I really need to make this skill and do whatever I need to do to make it. Because if we didn’t, it would be a missed skill.”

But she’d been here before — every one of those five days a week taught her what to do next. 

She gave it a little push. The leg slid. The crowd rose.

They held the M.C. Escher-esque frame for three seconds — the required time — before Cu twisted into her dismount.

They jogged off. Oregon rolled through its first meet of the season. It set a record-high in the team event, where Martin and Cu performed the skill again. That time, the foot didn’t stick.

Afterwards, on the mat, Susnara looked like she knew all along.

“Two freshmen, right out of the gates…acro event is a hard event to go out there, especially your first time ever competing at a collegiate meet,” she said. “They did fantastic. We had a little hiccup — I don’t even know if most could tell — but they recovered super well and so I’m proud of them.”

Their families are proud, too.

The Cus have one more flight booked this year — and one more meet to attend in Eugene, when Oregon’s final home outing rolls around on March 14. 

The Martins, meanwhile, will head to the Northeast for Oregon’s first away meets of the season in mid-March. Joe Martin is packing his green canvas banner, folded neatly. He’s bought and printed 11 more, for everyone he’s invited to join them. Shirts, too, from Angelica’s NIL site. 

“I told all our friends that they know what they’re getting for Christmas next year,” he said.

The two athletes have plenty of goals. A perfect-10 score in the event is first up — it’s something they’re chasing every day.

In Oregon’s practices, they savor the reps they get on the center of the mat, because it means that everyone’s eyes are on them. They’ll get feedback, which means they inch closer to their perfect score.

“We really want to get a 10-acro five, but it’s really hard because it’s a full inversion. It’s our goal, every practice when we do it on the floor. We’re always joking with Coach Jacie (Van de Zilver),” Cu said.

“We’re like, ‘This is gonna be a 10,’” Martin said. 

They’ll continue to chase it. The next week, against No. 1 Baylor, the two improved their score in the heat to 9.85 — higher than any Oregon score from 2024. No Duck group has scored a perfect-10 in the heat since 2021.

The two didn’t improve their score again in Oregon’s third meet, a win over No. 3 Gannon where they scored 9.75, but Martin was named the National Collegiate Acrobatics and Tumbling Association’s Freshman of the Week — her first-career national award.

After that?

“Say it,” Cu whispered to Martin in her interview. “Say it.”

“I’d love a national championship for acro five,” Martin said. 

At the NCATA National Championships every year, after team competition concludes, the best athletes in each event compete for individual national titles. That’s what’s on their mind — an individual event championship in five-element acro. No group of two freshmen have ever won.

They don’t believe they have to say it for it to happen, though.

“I feel like it’s a matter of how much work we put in this season and the work put into the actual skill,” Martin said. “It’s actually improved so much since we started doing it, drastically, in six months. So by the time we get to nationals, it could be even better than it is now.”

It’s quiet on the mat when they jog on every week. 

Their skill is loud enough.