The dance team will be hosting their first competition in the PAC on January 29 at 9:00 am. The doors will open at 8:30 am.

Last year, our dance team placed 5th in the Team Performance category  and 14th in the Jazz category at the NDA High School Nationals in Orlando, Florida. Our dancers have a tight schedule, “it starts with choreography, which we usually do around October, November-ish. We learn [the dances], we make adjustments, we keep practicing until they kind of get it into their bodies a little bit better, and then we start the cleaning process,” said Coach Schutz. 

Currently, our dancers practice for about two hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays with competition preparation sessions on the other days of the week. Their practices consist of practicing the jumps, turns, lifts, floor work, tumbling that are in their dance. They finally go over the dance in sections, and, “I’ll write down notes about things that they messed up, we’ll go over those things, we fix them, and then we do it over and over and over again,” said Coach Schutz with a chuckle. 

At their competition, judges are given score sheets. There’s six divisions: jazz, pom, hip-hop, kick, team performance, and gameday division. Coach Schutz further explains the judging,“ [they] each have a different score sheet, and each thing that [the judges] are looking for has a different point value.” As they go through the process of cleaning everything up, Coach Schutz acts as the pre-judge, “you kind of have the score sheet in the back of your mind as your cleaning dances and thinking: are they performing, did they look together, is the meaning of the dance coming across? So you kind of think about the score sheet in the back of your mind, and as you’re watching it, you look for specific things.”

“There’s a lot that goes into it,” said Coach Schutz as she reflected on all the work her dancers put in. This competition will be ‘turning’ heads, best of luck to our dancers!