Former Carroll cheerleader growing new sport at Baylor

Who said cheerleading isn’t a sport?

Well, it might not exactly be cheerleading as most have come to know it, but Acrobatics and Tumbling is a growing collegiate sport that gives high school competitive cheerleaders and gymnasts alike another option to earn an athletic scholarship.

Former Southlake Carroll cheerleader and soccer player Kelci Ortiz was a beneficiary of this honor, signing with the Baylor A&T team, and was in fact the first Carroll cheerleader ever to earn an athletic scholarship.

“It meant everything to me, because nobody has done it before,” she said. “Obviously it’s kind of scary, but I was very excited and I came to a great university.”

In her three years at Baylor, Ortiz has utilized skills she learned as a competitive cheerleader in a sport that resembles cheerleading, but adds aspects of gymnastics as well.

Each meet contains competitions for several different disciplines, such as tumbling, stunting and pyramids, and comes together at the end in the form of a team floor routine set to music.

“It really comes to fruition when you watch the team event because everything that you just saw is going to be put into synchronization with 24 people on the floor at one time with music,” Baylor head coach Felecia Mulkey said. “All of these really difficult moves you saw in the acro event, the toss event and the tumbling event will all be executed to music in synchronized fashion on the floor.”

A&T is not yet recognized as a NCAA championship sport and is governed by the National Colligate Acrobatics and Tumbling Association, which currently has 12 member schools. Scoring in the meets resembles that of NCAA gymnastics, due in part to the sport’s association with USA Gymnastics.

The competition, which is recognized as a Title IX sport, is a varsity sport at all the member institutions, therefore allowing coaches to recruit and offer scholarships. Mulkey said the NCATA is constantly reporting to the NCAA and she believes A&T will eventually be an NCAA championship sport.

“The NCAA is very aware of us and what we’re doing,” Mulkey said. “They follow our progress very closely. We give them updates yearly of what we’re doing in order to check all the boxes we need to check to become an NCAA sport. We will be, it’s simply a matter of when.”

As for Ortiz, who enters her senior year at Baylor as a defending national champion, physical strength from her years as a cheerleading base and a soccer player is her biggest asset.

However, Mulkey hopes she continues to lead vocally as well as by example in her final season in Waco.

“She is definitely the type of leader you want,” Mulkey said. “She’s so selfless. Coaches always want selfless leadership from their seniors. I think she’ll be one of the leaders that embraces the freshmen and teaches them what Baylor is all about because she takes a lot of pride in her school and her program.”

However, the ultimate goal is less about personal success and more about growing a sport that gave her an unforeseen opportunity after high school.

“Winning is obviously something for collegiate athletes that you want to do and accomplish, but I really think that for this sport, because it is so new, getting incoming freshman and promoting the sport is a huge thing for the people that are leaving and the people that just graduated,” she said.

This story was originally published June 29, 2015 at 3:39 PM with the headline "Former Carroll cheerleader growing new sport at Baylor."