By Imani Johnson
Staff Writer
Cheerleaders are something ingrained in American culture. Rare is the high school, college or professional sports events where we don’t see cheerleaders encouraging and entertaining the crowd from the sidelines.
But when it comes to a school’s dance team, many people may not understand the difference between it and cheer, and what the dance team is all about.
And California State University’s Dominguez Hills dance team is here to tell you all about it.
“Cheer focuses on yell-leading, stunting, and tumbling,” said Cilecia Foster, in her 12th season as head coach for CSUDH, who are the 2018 USA Collegiate Champions and 2018 UDA West Coast Champions. “Dance focuses on styles such as hip-hop, jazz, and pom; we are often confused with cheer because we have pom-poms but we model our program after all of the other collegiate and professional dance teams around the country who do the same.”
And, like any other team, there is a great deal of work that goes into the dance team. To be on the dance team, dancers must participate in a four-month-long process. Try-outs in April, offseason conditioning May through June, and two-a-day practices in July before moving on to training camp. And the work doesn’t stop when the semester begins.
“Our normal weekly schedule when preparing for game day consist of practice Tuesday through Friday,” Marisol Maldonado, a senior communications major, said. “When it comes to competition season, we bump those practices up to [two- a-day] also on weekends if learning new choreography, even when it’s competition season for us, we still have game day practices so practice is maybe 30 minutes to one hour long.”
Along with appearing at nearly every home Toro men’s and women’s basketball, soccer and volleyball games, the dance team is also rehearsing for competitive events.
“Not only do we have our competition season, not only are we preparing and fighting for something we want to win, but we’re also supporting every other team and we are there performing at their games, cheering teams on,” said America Alarcon, a junior, criminal justice major.
This season, dance could only participate in a couple competition.
“We needed more time to prepare to make sure when we actually went, we were ready,” Foster said. “We don’t want to go out there with not having our stuff together.”
CSUDH dance has accomplished many awards in the past two years. In 2017, they won Street Dance USA National Champions, 2017 and 2018 USA Collegiate Champions, 2018 UDA West Coast Champions [all open division one hip hop].
Yet, dance team members say many people of the CSUDH community have no idea of the team’s success or work ethic.
“We put in just as much if not more than a lot of other sports teams, said sophomore, Julliana Farillas, liberal studies major. “Volleyball, basketball, the basic sports that people think of when you say [sports], they don’t think about how much we do until they see our achievements.”
Other CSUDH teams have posters around campus, articles, and updates written on them weekly. But not the dance team.
“I don’t want to say our other teams are praised for the bare minimum but they are praised for a lot more than what the dance team could be praised for [for our big achievements],” Farillas said.
Foster understands why dance does not get a lot of recognition from the school.
“We don’t have a game for people to come to, we have our competitions but unless you are in our circle or in the athletics circle a lot of people don’t know about it.”
The dance team tries to inform people about their competitions through social media and word-of-mouth.
“A lot of people don’t know that we exist so it’s hard for them to recognize something they don’t know what’s happening,” Foster says. “Those that do know that we exist, I think that they can recognize us a little more.”
But even though dance may not get the attention it thinks it deserves, members say they remain proud of being part of such a winning ensemble.
“It’s a great feeling,” Guardado said. “The fourth year, second time winning a national championship, it feels good to know you won the first time and the second time is saying you’re the best, it makes you more confident.”
“Like other sports teams we don’t have scholarships so all this hard work that we are putting in truly comes from within, you have to want to be on this team,” said Maldonado. “We practice all season, we have breaks of course but only a week or two off and girls on this team are not just going to school, or just dancers, we have jobs some have two.”
For the upcoming season, tryouts will be held from April 14& 15th. To register go to Instagram.com/csudhdanceteam and click the link in their bio.
“We are looking for a lot of dancers this 2018-19 year,” says coach Foster.
