The dancers began in a straight line. Some stood upright while others crouched close to the ground. They leapt from one position to another, contorting their bodies in fluid movements. The music hit a crescendo, accentuating their stronger, sharper dance moves. After a few more twirls, the dancers fell to the ground and entered the next portion of their dance with fresh black makeup smeared across their faces.

In the dance studio at Ernie Davis Hall last Tuesday, Syracuse University’s Dance Team prepared for its first-ever national competition. The team will head to the National Dance Alliance Collegiate Cheer and Dance Championship in Daytona, Fla., on April 6. Specifically in the NDA competition, the Division I-A team will compete against 16 teams from across the country with the hope of snagging the first-place trophy.

‘Even though this is our first-year competition, I think the girls will do really well,’ said Katie Lappin, the team’s head coach of two years. ‘We’ve spent so much time talking about it, and now it’s actually a reality.’

On Thursday, the first day of the competition, all the teams perform. The top eight chosen from there move onto the final round. The bottom eight will compete in the Challenge Cup for the last spot in the finals. On Friday, the remaining nine teams battle for the first prize. The NDA competition will air on FSN on April 23 and 24.

Lappin’s team signed up for the Boston competition in the summer and attended the three-day NDA camp in August. All teams learned a dance the first day and performed it once in front of the judges. Their scores determined which teams received a bid qualifying them for nationals.

SU clinched one of the 16 spots.

‘We have worked so hard for this,’ Lappin said. ‘It shows how motivated the girls are to make a name for themselves as a competition team.’

The judges also awarded the team a partially paid bid to nationals. To fund the rest of the trip, the team did its own fundraising and made nearly $10,000.

With the fundraising taken care of, the team focused on learning a new dance. The dancers chose an ‘Alice In Wonderland’ theme, complete with music from the movie and bright turquoise dresses. A choreographer showed them the basics, but the captains made the routine their own.

‘We’ve come such a long way, you have no idea,’ said Bethany Whitley, the team’s captain and a television, radio and film and acting major. ‘But it’s like we’re dropping into a different world, just like Alice.’

The dance must incorporate three different styles: jazz, hip-hop and pom. The team starts out with the jazz portion and ends with its standard hip-hop formation, which the dancers regularly perform at basketball games. In two minutes, the team packed in triple spins, one-arm jumps and upside-down lifts.

‘It’s a high-intensity routine,’ Lappin said.

The dancers juggled perfecting this routine while creating new dances for the basketball season. They dedicated four days a week and four hours a day to practicing. On top of that, they had two scheduled workouts per week as well. 

‘The difficulty came in while having to make new basketball dances and still practice for nationals,’ said Megan Griffo, a sophomore magazine journalism major. ‘We didn’t want to ignore either responsibility.’

Griffo also said SU’s team is in a different position than a lot of other teams in the competition.

‘The difference between us and other schools is that we go to a school where basketball is very important,’ Griffo said. ‘Not every team has to go to all the games, but we do.’

Because of SU’s well-known basketball program, the Dance Team has always been a Carrier Dome-based team, as well as a college-based dance team, Whitley said.

‘Competing is a really big thing at other schools,’ Whitley said. ‘We’re the new kids on the block, but we’re creating a foundation for the years to come.’

Since she first took the position, Lappin made it her mission to take the team to a national competition. Once a collegiate dancer at the University of Albany, she wanted her team to experience the satisfaction that comes from competing at the national level.

‘I think the girls are going to do well,’ she said. ‘With their improvements from last year to this year, I think they will really fit in with the competition.’

Lappin gathered the dancers to work out the glitches in the routine. After running through it again, huffing and puffing, the dancers talked about what went wrong and how to improve. Walk with purpose; spot your turns; sharpen your arms, Lappin said. They want perfection and won’t stop practicing until their plane takes off to Daytona.

emmurp08@syr.edu

Published on April 5, 2011 at 12:00 pm