PITTSBURGH — Abby McDermott has grown accustomed to the looks she gets whenever she starts talking to someone about her chosen sport. The slight turn of the head. The brief pause in the conversation.“When you say ‘acrobatics and tumbling,’ especially ‘acrobatics,’ people think of the circus,” McDermott said with a laugh. The Duquesne graduate student gets it. It happens a lot. It wasn’t that long ago that the former artistic gymnast counted herself among the uninitiated. So she’s perfected a shorthand definition designed to turn confusion into curiosity. “When I describe it to people, it’s cool but it’s sometimes like weird because people are like, ‘What?’” McDermott said. “Then you have to do the whole ‘Well, it’s kind of like gymnastics and kind of like cheerleading but we don’t cheer.’”There are no balance beams or vaulting tables. No pompoms or megaphones. Just a massive foam mat rolled across an arena floor and a few dozen athletes on both sides ready to spend two hours flipping, soaring, yelling and finding joy in something that feels familiar yet is decidedly not.It began in 2009 with a half-dozen schools searching for a way to incorporate elements of those two well-known disciplines — gymnastics and cheerleading — into a showcase for female …
