Caldwell University’s head acrobatics and tumbling coach, Amirah Boyd, has never let her age define her.
In the spring of 2023, as her senior year at Presbyterian College in South Carolina was coming to an end, Boyd knew she wanted to be a coach. She had spent two years as a member and unofficial assistant coach of the college’s acrobatic and tumbling team. After she turned down an assistant coaching position, it was very clear to her: She didn’t want to gradually work her way up.
“Everyone was like, ‘You start as an assistant coach.’ I’m like, ‘No, I don’t want to,’ ” Boyd told Andscape. “I applied to a few [jobs], and I did get them, but I was like, ‘This isn’t really what I want to do.’ I know I want to recruit my own roster, I want to have my own team. I don’t really want to work under anyone.”
Two days after graduating from Presbyterian in May 2023, Boyd made an official visit to Caldwell University in New Jersey. Two weeks later, only a month after turning 22 years old, Boyd accepted a position leading the Division II university’s acrobatics and tumbling program, becoming one of the youngest coaches in NCAA athletics in the country. University of North Carolina head field hockey coach Erin Matson, who turned 24 in March, is the youngest coach in Division I.
“She didn’t take no as an answer,” said her mother, Nikol Boyd. “She knew this was what she wanted … so she did all of her homework. She met with people. She learned what a routine was supposed to be like. She’s learned how a practice goes.”
During the hiring process, Caldwell athletic director Mark Corino said, Boyd’s age and experience level weren’t major concerns for him.
“It’s a young sport. It’s a new sport so, you know, all the people that are involved in a sport are relatively young,” Corina said. “So it took us a little while to research and to get a pool of candidates, but certainly when I look back at it, I don’t think I could have done any better in hiring for this position than I did in hiring Amirah.”
According to the National Collegiate Acrobatics & Tumbling Association (NCATA), the governing body for the sport, the first acrobatics and tumbling programs started on college campuses in 2009 and have continually grown over the years. The NCAA added acrobatics and tumbling to its emerging women’s sports list in 2020. An acrobatics and tumbling meet consists of six events: a compulsory team event, acrobatics, pyramid, aerial toss, tumbling, and a final team event consisting of a two-minute choreographed routine.
According to NCATA, there are more than 50 member institutions that offer acrobatics and tumbling as a sponsored sport. Historically Black colleges Bluefield State University, Morgan State University, West Virginia State University and Talladega College have all added the sport to their athletic rosters.
“[Acrobatics and tumbling] is a sport for women. It’s one of the only sports aside from football that doesn’t have the opposite gender counterpart. There’s no male acro and tumbling,” Boyd said. “Gymnasts, cheerleaders, weightlifters, swimming, dive [athletes] realize, ‘I can be a collegiate athlete in a different sport and still use my sport that I grew up doing to be good at this. … I think that’s why people flocked to it so fast.”
On Feb. 24, during her first meet as a coach, Boyd led Caldwell’s acrobatics and tumbling team to the first victory in the second-year program’s history, defeating Stevenson University in Caldwell’s season opener.
“At first it was just like, ‘We’ve won, this is great.’ Then everything else kind of just settled in,” Boyd said. “I realized how big of a thing this was [and] it was like a lot of emotion. This is the first win in program history, this is the first win for me ever, and it’s also the first win for an acrobatics program in New Jersey.”
Boyd spent much of her childhood as a gymnast and reached level 10 status, the highest level in USA Gymnastics’ Junior Olympic Program. When Boyd was in high school, the Atlanta area native used to coach young children on basic acrobatics skills at her local gym in Georgia.
For Boyd, leadership is a family legacy: Her mother is an elementary school principal in Georgia. Her father, Amir Boyd, is an executive in the music industry. One of her grandmothers was a high-ranking non-enlisted member of the military.
“I’m happy that she had the opportunity to watch my leadership and then take it and run with it,” her mother said. “I have a feeling that she’s going to be even greater.”
In 2019, Boyd committed to Presbyterian as a member of its acrobatics and tumbling program. After an injury, Boyd spent most of her sophomore season as a manager and unofficial assistant coach for Amber Morrell, then coach of the acrobatics and tumbling program at Presbyterian.
Boyd and Morrell spent extensive time going over practice plans and the administrative side of coaching. Learning how Morrell recruited players gave Boyd a blueprint for recruiting players for her current program.
“She was one of those ones that I just felt like had a knack for it. … It was really her, just how she interacted with teammates,” Morrell said. “She’s a problem-solver, and she was really good at it. She was just already very forward-thinking about stuff and likes to not just problem-solve, but she’s very innovative and likes to be creative.”
Tom Salus
Boyd still maintains a healthy relationship with Morrell and current Presbyterian coach Kara Christian. She often talks to both coaches by phone, reviewing routines, ideas and issues during her first year.
“They’re very good with keeping up with me, making sure that I know that I’m supported,” Boyd said.
Currently, Caldwell is 3-2 with one more meet left in the season. The program finished 0-6 last year, its inaugural season. The one-year turnaround for the program was exactly what the university’s athletic director had in mind when he appointed Boyd as coach.
“I knew that she had the determination, the desire, and most importantly the passion for the sport … and so it didn’t take me long to figure out that this young lady was going to be a successful person in a coaching profession,” Corino said. “So, you know, I felt pretty comfortable in hiring her knowing that our program would be in good hands.”
Since the team’s first win of the season, Boyd has viewed every meet as a learning opportunity for the program. Subsequent weeks in practice are spent fine-tuning the little things, adding more elements to the team’s routines and introducing new choreography.
In its fourth meet of the season March 27 against Buffalo State, the team scored a program-high 204.675 points.
“[When] we got the first one, it’s like, ‘OK, now we have to build on that because no one can be comfortable with just one.’ So after every single meet … we’re just working harder to build on what we do have,” Boyd said. “One win wasn’t the only goal. It was to have a winning season, so we have to keep going.”
Boyd doesn’t have an assistant coach, so she’s in charge of coaching, recruiting and managing 18 student-athletes. The current age gap between Boyd and her athletes ranges from one year to four, but their closeness in age has helped her with recruiting.
“I wasn’t worried at all about her age, and I knew it would work for her as opposed to against her,” her mother said. “That’s literally how she’s been able to recruit, solely from her personality, and a lot of it is she wins the moms over and parents. After they come, they’re telling their kids, like, ‘Yeah, you’re gonna come here because I want you to be coached by Amirah.’ She’s just been mature for a very long time.”
As a former gymnast, Caldwell sophomore Isabella Garcia has experience learning under both younger and older coaches, so she kept an open mind after learning her new coach was only two years older than her.
“I feel like she knows how to connect with us in ways that maybe somebody else that was a lot older wouldn’t be able to, and it also feels like I still have a friend and a coach both in one,” Garcia said. “So I feel like it really works for us. And she still is able to, you know, assert her dominance.
“We still respect her as a higher-up, but at the end of the day, I know if I need her as a friend, like, I still have her there because we’re that close.”
Garcia, who also was on Caldwell’s inaugural team, said the turnaround the program has experienced under Boyd has given the team hope for the future.
“I’m actually very excited to see where this program ends up by, like, my senior year because of just how much we’ve grown in this one year with her as a coach,” she said. “I know by my senior year, I wouldn’t say we’d be one of the top programs, but I think we’ll be climbing up there, just because of Coach Boyd, her recruiting style and her coaching style, just everything she’s implemented.”
Boyd hopes to increase the program to around 30 athletes next season so Caldwell can compete with more Division I and established programs. Being a young Black coach in the sport while building up a young acrobatics and tumbling program has been a balancing act. Her biggest difficulty is being taken seriously, she said.
“It’s hard enough being a woman in positions of power, right, but now I add that I’m 22 years old, and then I’m a Black woman,” Boyd said. “So all of that. It’s like I have to prove myself sometimes [or] I just feel like I have to. I shouldn’t have to.”
The same promise her former coaches saw in her she sees in some of her current athletes, and she encourages them to pursue coaching in the future.
“I see the people who would make great coaches, too, which is like a full-circle moment because my coach saw it in me,” Boyd said. “I would love to coach with one or two or a few of them, if possible. I know one of my seniors wants to.”
When people ask Boyd how she became a coach at such a young age, her answer is simple.
“I put my mind to it, and that was really it,” she said. “If there’s something you really want to do, apply, go for it, do the thing. Let’s say you don’t get the job right away. OK, next year or when the next position opens, keep applying.
“There were a lot of jobs I didn’t get but I never let that deter me from what I actually wanted to do, because I knew some person was going to take me somewhere. And I knew the one that did was going to be the place that I needed to be.”
