By Kary Patron/Managing Editor

Cheerleading is well-known for its crowd-leading components and support for other teams such as football and basketball. Over the years, cheer has evolved and earned the respect of being called a sport. Missouri Valley College is known for its success in cheerleading, but the future looks bright for the newly added sport derived from cheerleading called STUNT.

MoVal STUNT made history by not only competing for the first time but also winning their first game 6-0 against Southwest Baptist on March 2, 2024. That same weekend, MVC lost against Maryville, Michigan State, and Missouri Baptist with scores of 22-0, 23-2, and 21-1.

Former Missouri Valley Cheerleader and Cheer Assistant Coach/Spirit Squad Coordinator, Tori Pimentel, leads the team as STUNT Head Coach. When Pimentel was a student, her former coach had the idea of bringing STUNT to Missouri Valley and bought jerseys, but making STUNT an official sport didn’t happen until this year. 

“Once I started coaching and we started expanding our program,” Pimentel said. “I decided I wanted to add that element to our program.”

STUNT was introduced in 2011 by USA Cheer in an attempt to expand the opportunities for female athletes to use their cheerleading skills in a new format. USA Cheer created STUNT to meet the Title IX requirements of a sport for colleges, universities, and high schools.

“Some of the skills and elements are the same,” Pimentel said. “But what we coach for cheer is for a two-minute and 30-second routine. Or for sidelines. But STUNT is a lot more strategic. I can plug in and out people so not everyone is in everything so it’s really been an entirely different structure and format to practices and really how we run the season. Fully different from cheer.”

STUNT removes the crowd-leading elements and focuses on the technical and athletic components of cheerleading. This sport is formatted as a head-to-head, four-quarter game between two teams who execute skill-based routines in various categories simultaneously.

The first quarter is partner stunts, the second quarter is pyramids and tosses, the third quarter is jumps and tumbling, and the fourth quarter is a team routine. Points are awarded to the team that executes the routine best.

Only one athlete in the Missouri Valley STUNT team had previous experience competing in this sport. MVC STUNT captain, Cheyenne Parsons, was a member of Southwest Baptist’s STUNT team for a year and a half before she transferred to Missouri Valley. Parsons’ experience allowed her to guide her team through their first season.

“You don’t get a full understanding until you compete,” Parsons said. “But since then it’s been pretty smooth sailing. They are very hard workers and are very excited to continue the program after I’m gone.”

MoVal entered the NAIA ranking polls at number 7 on March 3rd and maintained their place through the latest poll released on March 21st. The Vikings finish their inaugural season with a 2-6 record.

STUNT athletes wear jerseys with numbers to make them easily identifiable and be able to track individual statistics.