Felecia Mulkey was going to make it very, very clear.

“It’s not a matter of ‘if,’” she said. “It’s simply ‘when.’”

The head coach of Baylor University’s acrobatics and tumbling team was sitting in the middle of a cleared-out press room on the basement level at Oregon’s Matthew Knight Arena. The tables were pushed to the corners. It didn’t need to be formal. 

She was in Eugene for the Bears’ marquee meet against the Ducks, but before that, the woman who calls herself one of the sport’s historians was there to lay out a timeline for its (in her eyes, inevitable) ascension to NCAA Championship status. It was Feb. 22, 2025, she just had to say what she knew, and she was prepared to be direct, right then, at the end of her interview.

“In 36 months, the trophy will have a blue dot on it,” she said. 

The final legislation hadn’t been put in motion yet — that wouldn’t happen for another two months — but she was confident anyway. She reiterated it one more time, for good measure.

“We will be an NCAA Championship sport,” she said.

What she didn’t know then was that they were ahead of schedule. Eleven months later, on Jan. 16, ‘when’ finally arrived.

Three votes at the NCAA’s annual convention in January approved acrobatics and tumbling as an NCAA Championship sport. It passed the Division I cabinet meeting on Jan. 14, then the Division II and III votes on Jan. 16. After its final season of competition as a non-Championship sport begins next month, it will become the seventh to have risen through the Emerging Sports for Women pipeline, and will host its inaugural competition at the new level in 2027.

“People like an underdog story,” NCATA Executive Director Janell Cook said in December 2025. “And ours is a bit of an underdog story, you know?”

I: Pick up the phone

Cook didn’t expect the phone to ring.

The woman responsible for managing acrobatics and tumbling’s climb lives in Everett, Washington. She was sitting in her office in May 2025 — outside the door were two assistants. She knew that the sport was close to approval, and that the Committee on Women’s Athletics was meeting to discuss its progress. The next step was for the committee to vote to recommend the approval of the legislation to the three NCAA divisions. Cook didn’t think it would come up until the fall.

Her journey with the sport started a few hundred miles south, two decades earlier, at the University of Oregon, where she returned to the athletic department in a role focused on funding and exposure for women’s sports in 2006 after graduating as a softball student-athlete in 2003.

With the NCATA, which she joined in 2014, her role became focused on pushing acrobatics and tumbling through the NCAA emerging sport process. Often, that meant hearing negative feedback.

“There were many people who said really directly, ‘This will never happen. You guys will not be able to make this happen,” Cook said.

The process by which a sport rises from unrecognized to NCAA Championship level has — in the official guide — eight steps. An application is submitted, which is then reviewed by the committee, which then recommends that each applicable division add the sport to the Emerging Sports for Women program. The divisions then independently introduce and vote on legislation to adopt the sport.

After its adoption as an Emerging Sport, a minimum of 40 programs — 52 schools are expected to sponsor acrobatics and tumbling in 2026 — are required for consideration as an NCAA Championship sport. After that mark is met, the CWA meets to decide whether to recommend it again to the divisions — this time as a Championship sport, which was the May 15, 2025, vote for acrobatics and tumbling. 

Then, after a budget approval, the legislation is introduced again at the divisional level. Board members vote, typically at the NCAA Convention held annually in January. A deciding margin there is the final barrier; pass at all three levels by simple majority, and the sport is adopted and a committee is established.

After the NCATA applied to the Emerging Sports for Women program and was approved in 2020, Cook’s next goal took shape.

Her tenure, after reaching Emerging Sport status, has been focused on checking the next box in the Emerging Sport process: program count. Acrobatics and tumbling needed to grow from the 27-school mark it reached in 2020 to 40 in order to set the second set of legislation in motion.

When Cook took the role with the NCATA, now-Ducks head coach Taylor Susnara was starting her journey with the sport as a student-athlete. She remembers how much growth still needed to happen.

“I’ve said this a thousand times, but when I started as an athlete back in 2014, there were maybe like 10 to 15 schools, max,” Susnara said from her office last week. “And so the fact that it’s grown so much is just amazing.”

The growth is for real. It took eight years, but in 2022, the 40th school, Morgan State University, agreed to sponsor. That set the stage for another three years of waiting — this time for the committee to approve the 40-program margin and set the legislative recommendation in motion.

That’s who called when Cook picked up the phone. 

II: Arm-wrestling for the future

Greg Bamberger needs to get up to speed on arm wrestling.

Two years ago, when the NCATA National Championship returned to Fairmont, West Virginia, Bamberger was there to see it. He was in his fourth year at Fairmont State University as the athletic director, and while he wasn’t the point man on the competition, he was there to notice something: people showed up.

The NCATA contacts local gymnasiums and groups around host sites — “And I say local — they might have been out 50, 75 miles, especially in a little more remote area that we’re in as compared to Waco, Texas (at the University of Baylor) or Eugene, something like that,” Bamberger said — in order to welcome young athletes.

“(Fairmont doesn’t have) quite the population base, but they would work with these groups, and they would bring students or young girls, mostly, down to get exposed to the sport and allow them to see what it’s like,” Bamberger said.

As the NCATA looked to grow toward the 40-program mark, those moments were major, even if the universities that hosted them weren’t. That’s by design. There have been 14 NCATA Championships in the sport’s history. Seven different programs — Oregon, Baylor, Quinnipiac, Azusa Pacific, Fairmont State, Gannon and West Liberty — have hosted. Each of them birthed new connections.

For Cook, those moments are crucial. Local gyms and coaches are where the NCATA’s athletes come from, and her job revolves around educating them in order to grow the sport. A national championship is her opportunity. They choose non-Power Four schools like Fairmont (the 2024 host) or Augustana University (2025) in order to expand that base even further.

“We want to obviously drive fan attendance and have lots of people there to enjoy the event,” Cook said. “But the primary reason is to expose young women to the opportunities that acro and tumbling affords at the college.”

The arm-wrestling part comes in handy for the future. The NCAA will host the first edition of its new acrobatics and tumbling national championship in 2027. Everyone, Bamberger thinks, will want to host — he thinks Fairmont would be a great option; Mulkey said it’s brought up to her often by colleagues in Waco, even though she loves traveling for meets. There’s a clear solution in the Fairmont athletic director’s eyes.

“We’re all going to maybe arm wrestle for it,” Bamberger said.

III: Pack your bags

“I’m so terrible at packing,” Mulkey said, three days before the final vote.

She’d come back from practice in Waco earlier on Jan. 13, where she’d spent time explaining the enormity of the occasion to her team. She has to repack her bag from another trip. This time, her dogs are watching her get ready to head to Washington, D.C., to meet Bamberger and Cook. They were expecting good news from the NCAA’s meetings. 

Did she pack anything special to watch a sport reach championship status?

“I came home, washed all the same clothes and put it back in the bag,” Mulkey said. It wasn’t a huge deal; just her “life’s work,” she said.

Later that day, she was en route to Washington. Susnara, in Eugene, expected to be with her team or her staff when the vote went final. They regrouped after the school’s winter break — they’re finalizing events for the season. 

“I’ll be jumping up and down,” she said. “I’m eager to share the good news with the team.”

The news came through for the first time on Jan. 14, when the NCAA Division I Cabinet approved — unanimously — the sport for a national championship. It came again on Jan. 16, when Divisions II and III approved it, too.

Susnara and Mulkey don’t expect much to change in their day-to-day routines. They’ll still work through seasons, still on the collision course that has seen them battle in three of the last five national championship meets.

The change comes when they lift the trophy. It’ll have a blue dot on it — that’s what matters.

“I could think about all of the women that were competing the first year on the Oregon A&T program,” Cook said in December 2025. “And I was witnessing that and seeing how being able to participate changed our lives.”

She paused and reset.

“I gotta practice this, so I’m prepared,” she said.

“I’m most excited for all of those people that really invested when it was unsure what was going to happen,” she said. “When there were a lot of people that said, ‘Oh, this will never come to fruition,’ and the people that believed invested anyway, I’m really, really, really excited for those people.”

This year, they’ll all pack their bags again, for the final NCATA National Championship in Azusa, California, in April 2026. The next time they do, it’ll be for the first NCAA edition in its history.

Oregon hosts its first home meet of the 2026 season Feb. 21, against Quinnipiac University.