In a high-pressure situation, a team can support one another and rise, or it can panic and start instilling fear and blame. That is what I thought walking into the Sartell Sabre Dance Team as the only senior and captain into the State Tournament to defend our State Championship title from the previous year. Only half of the twenty-four girls dancing had danced on the daunting Target Center floor before, and I knew that although we needed to have a seamless performance based on unison timing and correct technique to win, we also needed to elude confidence to the judges. Since the younger dancers were feeling anxious to dance, I did not want to bombard them with lists of corrections and details to remember for the performance. My teammate, Hannah,
Success is not given, it is earned. Waking up for a 5am skating practice is nobody’s ideal Wednesday morning, especially for a hormonal teenager like myself. However, satisfaction of landing a new jump or learning a new spin does not come from letting our ‘wants’ buyout our dreams. “By the time we’d finished, we were amazed at how much the book had taught us: about ourselves.” I don’t always succeed, nor do I always expect to. Throughout all the morning practices and late night workouts, failure is something I have learned from. I remember giving up on myself countless times after falling on a jump or not turning my edges properly, as if I had ‘writer's-block,’ feeling completely numb. Nevertheless, succeeding was the easy part, it was learning to grow into the 6 year old singing, confident, child again, and defeating the numbness. I have learned, along the way, people are going to try to undercut your success or take credit for your hard work. However, it is the end product that matters. It will be I who knows how to complete a program, or I who knows how to work hard. Staying focused as the athlete I am, not letting people side track me, builds the confidence to know ‘I finished the
To make it even harder to focus, we could hear the music of another guard’s performance throughout warmup. I encouraged my team to stay focus on how we want to perform. As we prepared to perform, several girls began crying and hugging as if we were already done. I talked to each girl I passed and told them that it was time to focus and to show this crowd how good we are. That performance was the perfect ending to the season; it was everything we had worked for. However, we weren’t done yet; we still had to fold our floor, put away our flags, and get ready for the awards ceremony. On our way to put away our equipment, one of my girls started crying and apologizing for a mistake she had made, afraid that she compromised the show. I told her immediately that whatever score we made, we earned it as a team. I comforted her with my own struggles of perfectionism and feelings of inadequacy, but those feelings don’t necessarily reflect our
and in front of the whole school during spirit week and international week, without a bit of apprehension. Gaining this confidence was and is the key to victories in dance competitions. Confidence and my familiarity with a variety of dance forms such as hip-hop, jazz, and several Indian classical dances can be credited to my winning first place in a memorable competition, where, for the first time, my two friends and I choreographed the dance piece that we performed. This experience also helped as the same friends and I had 2 weeks to choreograph, perfect, and perform alongside a famous Indian singer as he sang live. These values specifically pushed me advance further into the art form, and were also extremely useful outside of the dance
The typical idea of a dancer is that they are tall, slender, full of energy, and lucky because they dance with all of the “stars”. Much of this is true, however, what many people do not think of are the many hardships that a dancer goes through in order to achieve their high status in the dance world. It takes much hard work and determination along with good direction to become a dancer. However, nothing good comes without a price. Dancers often times have many pressures put on them which can lead to physical and emotional damages. These damages occur through the pressures from the media, parents, teammates, and the stereotype that society has placed on dancers.
Probably one of the most important decisions I've made in my life happened this year. The decision was me , choosing whether i wanted to do drumline or play hockey. As a freshman going into the first year of highschool, it lead me to think of plenty of things. But one important fact that stuck out was me deciding if I wanted to pursue music or sports. As a freshman , I knew that I couldn't balance sports and marching band at the same time. Rehearsal for marching band happened everyday after school until 5 pm. I knew I couldn't do homework and study for tests with only 3 hours if hockey started at 9. So, I made the decision of choosing drumline over hockey. Not only would it help me balance my time doing homework, it would also help me on my
The sport of all-star cheerleading stresses dedication, sportsmanship, but most importantly the value of friendship. As the season progresses, a team, which once started out as multiple individuals with a common goal grows into one cohesive unit which bonds similarly to a family. Each athlete knows they have teammates who will support them in everything they do, on or off the mat. The team becomes dependent on each other to get through hard practices and to reassure each other of skills or give each other confidence. In particular, cheerleaders tend to grow closer than other sport teams. This is because during stunts and in routines athletes put their lives in each other’s hands. When completing a routine there are various stunts that include release tricks and a great amount of trust is required throughout the team in order for the routine to be successful. If a team is lacking trust or a strong bond between teammates, the routine becomes dangerous. At the end of each season, the athletes say goodbye to the seniors and as they welcome the new athletes into the family, it is clear that their strong bond lives on for the upcoming season. Although cheerleading teaches multiples lessons which will stick with the athlete their entire life, none are more important than the value of trust and
According to Martha Graham, “Dance is the hidden language of the soul.” To me, dancing is more than just a hobby, it is my life. My dance team is also more than just a team, it is my second family. Each girl on my team has her own unique personality, but somehow, we all get along well. We are all such good friends and have had to make it through many difficult situations already, but all it has done was bring us closer together. The girls on my team are all caring, talented, and funny.
Four years ago during the summer before my first year of high school, I started volunteering as coach of a fourth grade cheer squad with three of my friends. We needed to teach twenty-eight girls a one-minute dance and a hello cheer before their first game. I went into that first practice very naive, believing the girls would listen and do as I say. That practice turned out to be a complete mess. The kids jumped all over me, would not pay attention for more than three motions, and repeatedly asked me random questions about the things I liked. That two hour practice was one of the most hectic and frustrating moments I have experienced, but, at the same time, it was new, exciting, and entertaining. The past years of coaching have allowed me to form strong relationships with these girls to the point where I see them as my little sisters. Being their coach involves more than just teaching them cheers and dances, sometimes I have to settle their differences, comfort them, and let them have fun. When the girls reached sixth grade, the team started to go through drama. One practice, two girls
As the doors swung open to the NRG building and the cool air rushed to my face I knew today was going to be a good day. At the age of eleven I was introduced to one of the best things that has ever happened to me, Allstar cheerleading. Walking into the cheer competitions and having the smell of old sweat and dirty socks fill your nostrils isn’t what someone would necessarily describe as a good smell. We walk through the arena the burnt hair mixed with every cheerleaders favorite type of hairspray hitting you in the face, but smiling at everyone you see because you know that they are feeling the same nervous butterflies as you. There was always something about the smell of burnt nachos and over priced smoothies that brought me back to competition
There is something beautiful about dance, but there is something more beautiful about dancing with others. When a group of 13 girls and 1 boy can come together from 14 different ways of life and move together as one, then a dance team become more than just a dance team. This was not something that happened over night, it took time, effort and about 7 conversations with our coaches about our values. Without all of those components this team would have never became the successful, fighting, dream team that we became.
October 25th, the day of the 2014 Beach District Cheerleading Competition and our chance to go to Regionals. I woke up that morning with a knot in my stomach because I knew our time had come. We worked so hard those past three months to perfect our routine; we knew we were ready to win. As we were in the waiting area for our team to get called, my heart was pounding in fear and excitement. While watching the other teams on the projector, which I would prefer not to do. In a cheerleading competition I worry if the performing team is perfect, because the competition is more serious. Just my luck, it's our turn to warm-up. At that point, I'm terrified, my body became numb. I hate when my body does that because I feel as if I would pass out. Our
"C'mon, Chris, you get in the shower first," Taylor ordered from the other bed. "You're already up." Chris conceded and worked his way to the shower. Everyone in the room knew it too, due to his grunting and whining under his breath. Soon enough he was out of the shower and so were Taylor, Anders, and I. We ate breakfast with the rest of the team downstairs in the hotel in silence. It was too early to talk or chat. Everyone knew that one thing was going to be on their minds: winning. It was not worth discussing, either. Everyone knew that our varsity eight was possibly the strongest that McCallie had ever had, and that we had a good chance of winning some gold medals that day, if not a great chance. We loaded on the bus like ants, noiselessly flowing into one little opening. The bus ride was silent all of the way over as well. Everyone's heads, looking intently forward, were slightly jostling along with the bumps in the road. Some tried to sleep, but the tension and excitement was too much for most of them to be successful.
Growing up as a child I participated in countless sports outside of the school environment, but it was not until I joined field hockey at the age of twelve years old that I had felt a strong passion. At the age of thirteen, I had made it a goal of mine to represent my province at the national championships. In 2013 and 2014 I was unsuccessful towards becoming a part of the provincial team, but never gave up practicing and working hard. In 2015, I was named to the unofficial under-16 Ontario team, but was later replaced due to a leg injury six weeks prior to competition. The previous years of failure had only motivated me to continue trying and improving myself to achieve my goals, which finally paid off when I attended the 2016 Under-18 Women’s Canadian National Championships, representing my province. At the tournament, the first game that we played was against the under-18 women’s British Columbia field hockey team, the top seeded team in the entire tournament. Although the odds were against us, we surprised the other team and ourselves by scoring the first goal, as well as carrying the lead into half time. This was
Two weeks before school even started, the Hotchkiss High School Marching Band began its march to the state-qualifying competition in Delta. We worked four hours a day for five days, getting our fundamentals going and getting a feel for our new show. Once school did start, we started practice at 7:00 a.m. and went for two hours every day, working on music and marching. Our band was once again small (eighteen people!), but our sound was great. It was actually easier trying to teach a smaller group because of the difficulty of the moves we were attempting. Of course, I didn't help matters much by my trials of congeniality with the podium. I figured if I didn't fly off with flapping of my arms, then surely I would walk right off the stand.
Preparing for competition is easier said than done, you need a passion to complete the task. Competition is extremely stressful, but amazing at the same time. It?s a process of mixed emotions, not knowing if it?s importance will have a meaning in the end. Having practice six times a week allows us to work on our jumps, cheers, dances, tumbling, and the most difficult, stunting. Just the counts and lifting people in the air is traumatic enough, but repeating it over and over again it gets strenuous. Dancing is relaxing when you have counts to them, but when you have to learn the dance to the music people get confused and don?t know when to leave to the next formation. Team members start getting fed up with each other at the closing stages of practice, it?s just a natural human reaction after practicing with the same fifteen to twenty girls for three hours.