No. 2 Oregon acrobatics and tumbling, which opens its season Feb. 8 on the road at Missouri State University, will do so without standout base Bella Swarthout. The junior, who played a major role in the Ducks’ 2025 campaign, will miss all of the 2026 season to recover from offseason surgery, she told The Daily Emerald.

Swarthout is a multi-event starter for Oregon, which finished the 2025 season as the national runner-up with three event titles. 

“I’m definitely struggling, especially with the season starting this weekend,” Swarthout said. “It’s a lot of emotions, but I’m just really trying to think one step at a time.”

Her surgery, she told the Emerald, was to address compartment syndrome in her forearms, which she was officially diagnosed with in fall 2025. In the offseason, she made the decision to get a double fasciotomy on each of her arms before Oregon went on its winter break, knowing that it would end her season.

“I didn’t want to jeopardize my senior season,” Swarthout said. “You can’t redshirt as a senior, so I didn’t want to take any chances, and with this being a newer surgery, I was like, ‘I would rather do it now and have the whole year to recover I can redshirt and come back if I want to.’”

It’s her first major injury as an athlete at Oregon. She’d been dealing with the pain for a while, she said, and didn’t want to jeopardize her senior season. She got the surgery the week of Oregon’s fall finals week and recovered at home.

“It’s hard, because this is such a rare surgery,” Swarthout said. “You don’t see it, like ever…I’m just trying to ‘one-step-at-a-time’ it and ‘next-play’ it. The doctors, the coaches, the trainers — we’re all trying to figure it out as we go. I’m hanging in there for sure.”

On the mat, Swarthout spent the 2025 season as the mid-base in one of the Ducks’ best heats, the open pyramid. After she was named NCATA Freshman of the Week when the open pyramid scored a 10.0 in 2024 against Hawaii Pacific University, the heat earned perfect scores twice during her sophomore season and averaged 9.91 points through the Ducks’ nine meets in 2025 en route to an event national title. 

Off the mat, she’s been documenting her recovery process on TikTok, where she’s posting day-in-the-life videos. 

“It was my mom who pushed me,” Swarthout said. “There’s no reason why I couldn’t do this and share a little bit about compartment syndrome and my life as a Division I athlete in general.”

Even without Swarthout in the lineup, the Ducks are still poised for a strong season. They landed second in the preseason NCATA coaches’ poll, and will return multiple members of a freshman class that shone in 2025, including base Angelica Martin. Martin was a specialty base in 2025, when she was named the NCATA Freshman of the Week in Week 5 and an honorable mention in the same category six times.

Also returning will be base Blessyn McMorris, who missed the 2024 season with injury before bouncing back with an All American season in 2025. She participated with Swarthout in the open pyramid, and was named NCATA Athlete of the Week in Week 2.

“She’s already in such a big role,” Swarthout said of McMorris, “But she continues to grow every year.”

Oregon will open its season Feb. 8 on the road against Missouri State University before its home opener Feb. 23 against Quinnipiac University at Matthew Knight Arena.