Author: Danielle Sherman
The Occidental dance team was excited to return from the UDA Regional Southern California Dance Competition at University of California Irvine with a second place finish, scoring just four points below the winning score with a 402.
The all-girl team had filmed a video of its competition dance and submitted it before competing as an audition for nationals, performing their routine in simple costumes in the Oxy gym.
“It’s a tough process,” coach Allison Truscheit ’08 said of the filming. “It’s like catching lightning in a bottle […] you can take as many takes as you want, but you can’t edit it. You have to keep doing the dance until it’s the way you want, but at the same time, the girls get progressively more tired.”
Once competition time came, the girls pulled together and scored about 100 points higher than they had received on the audition video.
“Winning second place was exciting, but the most exciting thing was seeing that we were learning to dance as one unit,” Jennifer Phan (senior) said. The team had spent the week before the competition having rigorous practices almost everyday, “but to see it all pay off in one really synchronized and energized performance made all the hard work worth it,” Phan said.
This is only the Tigers’ second competitive season ever, and it has been more intense this year than last according to member Jennifer Goth (junior). “There is more of a focus on Nationals, and football and basketball games are more of a supplement and a training for the end goal of the National Competition” said Goth.
The team’s main goal focuses around their performance at Nationals: they want to make it to finals. “That is a lofty goal,” Truscheit, said, “but if you don’t dream big, you can’t get big results.”
“We all want finals, we want to dance on ESPN and we want to put Oxy on the map in the world of dance,” Phan said. “And with this team, we can do it.”
To work towards this goal, the team will be working on cleaning up their routine by fine-tuning their technique to improve their score. They will have camp in January and dance for at least four hours a day to prepare for Nationals at the end of the month.
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