STUNT is the fastest growing female sport in the country. It’s derived from traditional cheer, but takes away the crowd-pleasing elements and focuses only on the technical and athletic parts of cheer.
“It basically takes all of the subjectiveness out of cheerleading, it turns cheerleading into a sport,” said BYU head cheer coach, Jocelyn Allan.
STUNT is broken into four quarters with each one increasing in difficulty. The first quarter is partner stunts, the second is pyramids and tosses, the third is jumps and tumbling, and the last and most difficult quarter is the team routine.
“It’s exhausting. They’re doing high level tumbling high level stunting all at the same time, and precision matters. Every little step that they take is judged, or don’t take, and so I think that’s gonna be the hardest part for us is just working on the stamina of doing those high level routines one after another,” said Allan.
Both teams compete at the exact same time doing the same routine. Whoever performs the cleaner routine, wins.
“It’s really easy to tell back and forth like they won they were cleaner they hit on the right count so you’re out there actually competing with another team at the same time. It makes it really to understand and it’s just more like a sport and a little less subjective,” said Allan.
BYU started competing in STUNT just last year. The team previously only competed in traditional cheer competitions, but when the coach heard about STUNT they quickly made the switch.
“It’s fun to learn these routines and pick up on them kind of quickly and then look and say ok this is possible and it’s really exciting because of how close we got last year to see that we can compete and make it to nationals,” said BYU STUNT team captain, Macey Davis.
Because of the late start last year, the team only practiced the routines for 5 weeks before competing and taking 5th place. They hope that the extra time this year will bring them closer competing in the championships and taking the title.
