According to Monica, there used to be more teams to go up against but the NCA divided the junior college division into “advanced” and “intermediate” groups. Monica explained that the intermediate groups are restricted to the types of stunts they can do. For example, intermediate competitors are not allowed to do pyramids that are more than two persons high and tumblers cannot do back tucks, according to the NCA.
“So it’s really good for teams that just don’t have the skills to compete with us, what we do,” Monica said. “I think the reason they did that is people were trying things that they really had no business doing, trying to do these harder skills to compete, but they didn’t have necessarily the talent to do it. Anyways, it opened up these intermediate divisions, so teams started dropping down to these intermediate divisions. Our division kept shrinking and shrinking.”
While Slate asked Varsity, the organizers of Daytona, about these rules, the organization couldn’t confirm if that’s the reason for the small pool of competitors. The Varsity spokesperson told the outlet, “We do not have firsthand knowledge of the decision-making process for these teams.”