What if someone told you that Sacramento State has a nationally ranked athletic program on its campus?

You might guess it’d be the gymnastics team or the women’s tennis program, but you’d be wrong – one of the best STUNT teams in the country has given Sac State something to cheer about.

STUNT cheerleading might be relatively new to the NCAA scene, but for what it lacks in age, it makes up for in ingenuity.

“STUNT removes the crowd-leading element and focuses on the technical and athletic components of cheer, including partner stunts, pyramids, basket tosses, group jumps and tumbling,” according to USACheer.net. “USA Cheer created STUNT as an opportunity for colleges, universities and high school to meet the strict Title IX requirements of a college sport, while still preserving traditional cheerleading.”

Lauri Harris, cheer team director at Sac State, has witnessed the team’s growth in the last 20 years as she has been both a cheerleader and a coach for the program. Her duties now consist of overseeing the coaching staff and the cheerleaders in their various activities.

“There’s the Universal Cheerleaders Association college nationals which air on ESPN. They’ve been participating in that for the past 16 years, so ever since then it’s become a more nationally exposed program and it has attracted a more high level of talent in addition to that school spirit,” Harris said. “More recently, in the past five years, what we’re doing right now is our STUNT program, and it’s a new sport for cheer that is about six years old. It takes the skills from cheerleading and puts them into a sport format, which is a head-to-head format, which is much different than the traditional cheer competition … this is skill-for-skill, head-to-head.”

The Hornets have proved themselves to be one of the strongest STUNT teams in the country as they placed fourth in the nation last year at the Division I National Championships in Oklahoma on May 2.

This year’s team is currently ranked third in the NCAA and will have the honor of hosting the sixth annual championship tournament at Sac State on April 28, according to Harris.

Kori Thomas, STUNT coach at Sac State, has been a major contributor to this success as she enters her fourth season at the helm of the program and believes that determination is what sets the team apart from others.

“I think it’s our passion. We have the skills, which is crucial … we have girls coming from the coed team helping us, which helps with tumbling. But I think it’s that we want to do well,” Thomas said. “This team wants to have a name for themselves. It’s always been known as a coed program … so the fight for it to actually be known as an all-girl program is what keeps us doing so well.”

The battle for prestige isn’t the only motivation–sophomore Gabriela Vega, a psychology major, also believes the mental and physical grind of STUNT is to be taken seriously each day because the cheerleaders need to prove that it’s a sport just like any other.

“We train like every other sport does,” Vega said. “We go to the gym, we hold ourselves as a team to this standard that we have practice Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday so we’re at the gym Monday, Wednesday and Friday on the opposite of those days. We train like every other athlete and especially with STUNT…it’s actually one-on-one, right here and now, who’s better?”

Much like any other sport, injuries have been known to affect STUNT athletes at Sac State. Senior Cera Moreno tore her ACL and meniscus at nationals last year, but has since battled back to lead her team to an 9-1 overall record.

“It took me about six to eight months of rehab and I lost all the muscle in my leg. It was hard to walk again, so being able to come back again and stunt and tumble is the best thing ever,” Moreno said. “I couldn’t have done it without my teammates. Having knee surgery and then having someone relying on me to catch them again … trust is such a big thing, and that goes for anything outside like school and our careers going forward.”

Harris and Thomas factor in aspects such as these during the recruitment and tryout process, which will take place on May 1.

“We do look at grades to make sure you’re actually doing your work. We don’t like the kind of stereotypical cheerleader that people made up a long time ago about cheerleaders being dumb,” Thomas said. “We make sure they actually have an idea what cheerleading is and have a really good presentation of themselves. You have to want to be here, not just the person that wants to wear the skirt.”

The Hornets will next have the chance to compete at the NCAA Division I National Championships on April 28 at Sac State and on April 29 at Sacramento Memorial Auditorium, which will be covered live by ESPN3.