Apollo-Ridge grad Olivia Stiffy uses gymnastics, cheer background as part of new STUNT team at Mercyhurst

While she was growing up, Olivia Stiffy competed as a gymnast for nearly a decade, including representing Apollo-Ridge at the WPIAL level. But she never considered playing any kind of sports beyond high school.

Also a longtime cheerleader, Stiffy joined the football cheer squad at Mercyhurst, which seemed to satisfy her desire to be involved in an extracurricular activity.

Then the Lakers’ cheer coach, Ruthanne Mineo, approached Stiffy with a proposition: Mercyhurst was adding a new intercollegiate sport in the spring, and Mineo, who would serve as the coach, thought Stiffy would be a perfect fit for the team. This new sport was STUNT.

STUNT — it generally is spelled in all caps but is not an acronym — takes the athletic aspects of cheerleading and turns them into a simultaneous, head-to-head competition between two squads. The routines are set to music, but there is no cheering and no dance element.

“When I first heard of it, I thought it was very interesting because I never really saw myself doing sports in college,” said Stiffy, a junior. “So when they said that, I thought that would be awesome because I really love the competitive aspect of it, and in gymnastics, I always loved the competition.”

Here is how a STUNT game — its participants are adamant about calling it a “game” — works:

Two teams compete on side-by-by side mats. As in football or basketball, there are four quarters and a halftime. There’s even a coin toss to determine which team chooses the first routine.

There is a separate skill for each quarter, and each skill has eight possible routines, Routine 1 being the easiest and Routine 8 being the hardest. The first quarter is partner stunts, the second quarter pyramids and tosses, third quarter jumps and tumbling and the fourth quarter combines all three into one routine.

The winner of the coin toss can choose to select the first routine or defer to later in the game. In the first quarter, four of the eight partner stunt routines are performed, with each routine lasting 30 seconds. Teams perform simultaneously, and judges award points based on which team executed the skill better. Each team can receive up to three points per round.

The next two quarters proceed the same way. In the fourth quarter, when all the skills are combined, the routines are 90 seconds, and a skill from each of the disciplines is performed in succession. To wit, if a team calls Routine 4, then Routine 4 from the partner stunts, pyramids/tosses and jumps/tumbling list are performed.

The team with the most points at the end, naturally, wins.

“There is a lot of strategy in it,” Stiffy said. “That’s why it’s important you watch other teams play. If we watch one of their routines, and let’s say the first quarter pyramids and tosses, we call Routine 3 because we know they don’t hit it that much or they bobble it a lot and we have it down pat.”

Mineo was a cheerleader at Mercyhurst, and her assistant STUNT coach, Kristin Lorei-Berry, was her cheer coach for the Lakers. The pair have Mercyhurst off to a 4-3 start in their inaugural season. Mercyhurst went 3-1 in its opening games in Nashville before going 1-2 in its first home games Feb. 10 and 11.

The team competes in the Great Midwest Athletic Conference.

STUNT, Mineo said, has been around for a little more than a decade, and it still is not widespread. Right now, California and Oklahoma are the only states that sanction STUNT at the high school level, so Mineo recruits her athletes from other sports, hence luring Stiffy and her gymnastics skills.

She also has an athlete who played rugby in high school and a young lady arriving with next year’s class who is a power lifter. Fifteen of the current athletes are from Pennsylvania, four are from New York, two from Ohio and one each from Alabama and Michigan. Next year she will bring in players from Texas and California.

“What’s cool about STUNT is I can recruit from anywhere,” said Mineo, noting Mercyhurst is the first collegiate STUNT program in Pennsylvania. “Of the 23 people on my team, 22 have never played STUNT before.

“If they are coachable and have the strength, I can teach them how to STUNT.”

Like players in other sports, STUNT athletes have specialized skills. Stiffy, for example, because of her gymnastics training, has been competing only in the jumps/tumbling portions of games. She has played in the third quarter and in the jumps/tumbling portion of the fourth quarter of every game.

“She comes from a strong gymnastics background and a smaller cheer background,” Mineo said. “But her gymnastics background is really strong. So when we got STUNT, I told her I really want (her) to be on our jump/tumble team.”

Stiffy, like most of the other ladies on the team, is in a sort of learn-as-you-go mode, but she has come to appreciate how STUNT operates just like any other sport.

“I would say it is very much like a team sport that you really have to work together,” she said. “You have to put the best people out there, and I think that’s a hard thing because it’s not … I feel like in cheerleading, you give everybody a chance, but with this, sometimes you have to do what’s best for the team and put the best people out there for that position.”

Mineo said STUNT is growing quickly. She pointed to the national STUNT Instagram account (@stuntthesport), which, she said, has an almost daily announcement about a high school or college adding the sport to its lineup.

Further, STUNT has been identified by the NCAA as an “emerging sport” at the Division I and II levels. Per ncaa.org, an emerging sport is a women’s sport recognized by the NCAA that is intended to help schools provide more athletics opportunities for women and more sport-sponsorship options for the institutions and also help that sport achieve NCAA championship status.

To be legislatively considered for an NCAA championship, the NCAA website notes, sports in the Emerging Sports for Women program must be sponsored at the varsity level by at least 40 schools, based on the NCAA Sports Sponsorship and Participation Rates data, and must meet their sport’s minimum competition and participant requirements.

Stiffy has only one more year to compete before she graduates, so she might be “retired” before an NCAA championship come to fruition for her sport. But she is happy to have taken the plunge and been part of something new.

“I have loved it so far,” she said. “It’s definitely a lot of work. I love my team so much. They are incredible. I think what we want to accomplish is … each game just do better for ourselves and just do better than the last game that we did.

“It’s not always about winning. As long as we can do better than we did at the last game or the last practice, that’s what’s important to us.”