“There’s a national championship today,” said no one ever on the grounds of Augustana University.

Oh, but there will be. The 100-acre, sub-2,000 undergraduate student university was chosen to host the 2025 NCATA National Championship. On day 61 of the 2025 season, eight teams will arrive in Sioux Falls with a shot at the title. Fee Mulkey is planning on being there. So is Taylor Susnara. They’re ready.

Day One was over a decade ago, and this sport is still innovating. New leaders are learning, new opportunities continue to emerge and national relevance continues to grow. Small universities will be the ones to put on the pinnacle of the sport, because that is what this is all about: providing chances for people denied them to surge to the next level. It’s been like that since day one.

So much has changed since day one, 2011. Mulkey’s pitch, for one. It’s no longer about cutting a path through the wilderness — she knows what she’s doing. “Now it’s ‘come be a pioneer in this new sport,’” she said. “Now it’s, ‘I don’t want to talk you out of doing cheerleading. I don’t want to talk you out of doing college gymnastics. I want to tell you about this other opportunity.’”

“Women need to have options,” she finishes. “Women need to have choices and now these women get to make choices.”

Mulkey’s done a tremendous job as the head coach at Baylor University for the past nine seasons. She’s the one who has shaped the landscape for those decisions. 

Twelve years ago, Susnara would’ve never been breaking down film a few doors down from the Oregon football program. Now, she is.

On day one of the 2025 season — the real day one, which for Oregon is February 15 — there will be a chance. It’s day one for the 10 freshmen on a Ducks team that is, in Mulkey’s words, built to offer them an opportunity — a word she used 18 times in her interview with the Emerald. 

Susnara (who used it seven times) and her mentor are very aware of the connotations around Title IX that apply to their sport. Neither shy away from the concept that Oregon’s 41 rostered acrobatics and tumbling athletes bring crucial balance to the Title IX field. It’s just another opportunity.

“You have to own what it is,” Mulkey said. 

She doesn’t expect the athletic directors whom she visits to share her passion for the sport, but she sees the ability to pitch the sport and its benefits as a “win-win.” They don’t have a “male counterpart,” Mulkey said, like baseball does softball or men’s and women’s basketball do, but it changes nothing.

On day one, the only people who matter to the coaches are the ones on their roster.

NEW BEGINNINGS IN MONTEVALLO, AL.

Even far from its peak, the sport is growing more than it ever has. The University of Montevallo — located an hour outside of Tuscaloosa, AL — was the 52nd school to add A&T, it announced in March 2023. Its day one will be this week, an hour east at Talladega College. Its head coach is Kati Horstmann, a Baylor alumna who competed under Mulkey between 2016 and 2019.

Mulkey’s impact is unmistakable. Montevallo’s announcement from NCATA director Janell Cook reads, “Gymnasts and cheerleaders in the state, and region, will benefit from new, unique opportunities to be a varsity student-athlete at Montevallo.”

There’s that word again: “Opportunity.”

“There’s just so many different ways that these women have been training their entire lives,” Horstmann said. “And after they graduate high school, it’s ‘Okay, you’re done.’ Acro comes along to create more opportunities for women to be able to compete at the collegiate level. It’s something that’s really, really special.”

The job isn’t a handout for former athletes like Horstmann and Susnara, though.

Mulkey explained that they can’t just teach the exact skills and techniques they learned and competed with while in school. Susnara corroborates: A young sport evolves so fast that even Susnara and Horstmann’s recent experience won’t be enough to guarantee success. They’ll have to push the envelope — “You’ve got to teach what you want to see on the floor in four years,” Mulkey said.

Horstmann has been joking with a fellow first-year coach. They feel so rusty when they see what’s happening today. She graduated from Baylor less than five years ago, a four-time national champion at the peak of the sport, but she’s watching meets to stay on track. A three-ring binder with the NCATA’s hundred-plus page breakdown of point deductions rests by her right hand. 

Five years from now, there will have been even more day ones, more new coaches and new first programs. The sport sprinting at a breakneck pace doesn’t wait for them to catch up.

Montevallo hosted a mock meet two weeks ago. Horstmann’s team is full of freshmen who have never competed before. They’re confident. They’re so talented. Day one can’t come soon enough.

She describes an “aha moment.” The puzzle pieces will click into place for her team. “At that first meet,” she said, “they’re going to be able to finally see: ‘Oh, okay. I understand now.”

Oregon sophomore athlete Bella Swarthout understands it now, too. After a freshman year that raced past expectations into award nominations, she’s had her “aha” moment. Other moments, though, stick in her mind.

She remembers the semifinal locker room at last year’s National Championship, in Fairmont, WV. It’s pretty painful, she said, to compete back-to-back meets. “But once we’re in that locker room…you have no other choice. You can’t be in some other world or be tired. You just have to remind yourself [that] this is what you’ve worked for.”

Oregon lost that meet. Swarthout lost a team with incredible chemistry, filled with leaders. “That was more of a heartbreak to me,” she said, “than losing was.” That’s been this offseason: meeting new teammates, talking to old ones and figuring out how to make another run at a title.

There’s something different about those championship meets, Swarthout said.

She called them “an opportunity.”

DEFINING LEADERSHIP 

There’s only one way for programs to stay the course within a headlong sprint towards the top: find a leader. Baylor has its matriarch. Oregon has discovered a successor. Montevallo is betting on Horstmann. They all have similar definitions of leadership.

Susnara calls it “stepping up when no one asks you to.” 

Swarthout defines it as “someone who wants to better everyone.” 

Horstmann said, “When you are able to create a culture where people feel seen and heard and valued, and that there’s a plan for them and that they’re a part of something greater…I think being able to create that is true leadership.”

These are the people at the crest of the wave. They don’t have it all figured out — no one does, maybe save Mulkey. They’re pushing, though, for more. More opportunities. More competition. More chances to go out there and enjoy the rush one more time.

“Is every single day as a collegiate athlete going to be fun?” Horstmann asks. “No, there’s going to be hard times. There’s going to be days that you have to push through. But at the end of the day, athletics should be enriching to your life, and if it’s not adding to your life, then what are you doing?”

What are they doing?

As Mulkey and Susnara — the sport’s two vital coaches — prepare for the season ahead, separated by a few thousand miles and a few years of history, they’ll start to think. Acro is a special sport, in that each team has no ability to affect its opponent’s performance. Each time they step on the mat, it’s with the express goal of simply out-executing the other.

While they wait at the end of the mat for their athletes, each coach will give them a hug, whisper advice in their ear, and send them back to the team. It’s all they can do. In a sport where there’s no head-to-head competition, these two do it best. They’ll be there at the start. They’ll meet in the end, they hope, because there’s nothing sweeter than climbing a mountain you’ve grown up in the shadow of.

But for both, success is about more than winning. It’s one last chance for their athletes to lay their emotions on the line, and about offering the opportunity to become “a whole human,” Susnara said. “You’re not gonna make a million dollars,” Mulkey said, “but you can learn some life skills.”

Nobody knew about the National Championship last year in Fairmont, West Virginia. Nobody cared about the sport sketched out on a napkin 35,000 feet in the air. In hours of on-record discussion, Mulkey and Susnara named just one shared goal amidst all of their rivalry:

They’re going to change that.

This is Part III of a three-part series following key figures in the world of acrobatics and tumbling through their quest for a national championship. Find Parts I and II online at dailyemerald.com.