STUNT just became a full NCAA championship sport. All three divisions approved it at the January 2026 convention, with the first championship set for spring 2027.

That single fact changes the recruiting picture for every family reading this. A sport that was an emerging sport a year ago now has a real finish line, and programs are adding roster spots to get ready for it.

Most STUNT programs are still young. A lot of coaching staffs built their first roster in the last three or four years. That means the coach answering your kid’s email is often the same person who founded the program, not a recruiting coordinator three layers removed from the head coach.

Reach that person directly. STUNT coaches list an email on the athletics website, and a short message from a recruit gets read fast because there isn’t a mountain of mail to sort through first.

The video is the whole pitch. Send a skills video showing partner stunts, tosses, pyramid work, and tumbling, each clip labeled with the skill and the position. A coach building a roster of bases, backspots, and tops wants to see position-specific execution, not a highlight reel set to music.

Keep it under five minutes. Longer than that and it reads like padding.

College clinics and combines matter more here than in most sports. USA Cheer runs recruiting combines specifically so college coaches can see athletes execute live, which is a bigger deal in a sport built on standardized, scored routines. A coach watching your kid hit a called stunt in person learns more in twenty minutes than any video shows.

Go to camps hosted by schools your athlete actually wants to attend, not every camp within driving distance.

Timing tracks the rest of college sports, with one difference. Junior year is when real conversations start. Senior year is when offers and official visits get finalized.

The difference is that new programs launch every year, meaning a roster spot can open up that didn’t exist when your daughter started her search. Twelve new collegiate programs launched for the 2026 season alone, across Division I, II, III, and NAIA. Checking back with a program that said no in October is not desperate. It is smart, because the roster itself might not have existed yet.

Scholarship money is real and growing. The NCAA raised the scholarship cap for STUNT programs to a roster-based model allowing up to 65 scholarships per program. That is not 65 full rides, and most of it is partial aid spread across a roster, but it is a real number in a sport most families have never heard of.

Ask a program directly what its aid model looks like. It varies a lot right now because the sport is still young enough that no two athletic departments fund it identically.

Don’t pay for a recruiting service. The sport is small and direct enough that a family doing its own outreach can match anything a paid service offers. The STUNT pathway covers what skill level actually gets a roster spot, which is worth reading before that first email goes out.

One more thing worth saying plainly. A sport that just got NCAA championship status is not a fad your daughter should treat like a stepping stone.

It is the real thing now, with a championship weekend on the calendar. Recruit into it like you would any sport with a trophy at the end.