West Springfield Dance Captures Second National Title

The West Springfield Dance Team placed first in the nation with their large varsity hip-hop routine Sunday in Orlando, making this the second year in a row that the Spartans have claimed the national championship in their dance category.

This year, they won with an energetic, sometimes robotic in nature, takeoff of the Matrix franchise, wearing black trench coats, creepy white contacts, and black wigs to complete the theme.

In the highly competitive world of high school dance, winning is the team’s payoff for a year of three hour a day, five day a week practices.

“They came home wearing their national jackets last year and you think they would have won a million dollars,” said Jason King, one of two directors of the team. “They’re the most dedicated kids we’ve ever had.”

King, a self-taught hip-hop dancer who’s appeared in a music video by The Roots and had a brief stint on “So You Think You Can Dance,” directs the team with Tara Perez, a former member and coach for the Wizards dance team who has a dance degree from Mason. Their position is “part-time,” but they’ve been working 40 hours a week year-round in addition to their other commitments. Perez has been coaching the team for eight years - King for five.

“Seeing what they can do makes it worth it for us,” King said. “Some of the kids we’ve gotten in here have had very low self esteem. You can see their confidence boost. By the end of the year, parents come up to us and say ‘this program has saved my kid.’”

“It motivates them because they have to have a certain GPA and they have to do well in their classes to participate,” Perez said. “It keeps them motivated- academically and socially.”

The team must be constantly vigilant to keep their performance videos and pictures off of Youtube and Facebook until the final performance.

“We ask the user to take it off [the website],” Perez said. “Nationals is a big deal with us. We want to go down in nationals not having anything on the Internet. No one knows our theme, our costume, our ideas. We want it to be a surprise for them.”

Perez and King start work right after Nationals to come up with the next years routine, mixing music and coming up with choreography and a theme. Last year, they won with a hard rock routine based off of the dark portrayal of the Joker in the latest Batman movie.

“We don’t necessarily want to do the same thing a lot of dance teams do,” King said. “ We like to go outside the box with the stuff that we do.”

“It’s a long process,” Perez said. “We start right after nationals and the routine keeps changing the entire year. This [Matrix] routine probably changed at least 5, 6 or 7 times. We’re always thinking of new ideas and new changes to make to make it better and make it more clean.”

The dance team members know they’re considered the ones to beat at Nationals, but they try not to think about it.

“On this team we get taught not to be cocky and to be humble,” said junior Nicky Ditnoy, one of only two boys on the team. “It’s very cool that people look up to us but we always know that if you’re too cocky they’ll just snatch it right away from us. We work hard to be where we are.”

“As good as it feels, it still gives you a knot in your stomach because you never know how good the other teams are,” said senior Kate DeClark, who’s been in the group for three years.

Several team members referred to their group as a big family.

“Once I made the team it was so welcoming,” said senior Julian Asuncion, the other boy on the team. “There were no cliques here – everybody was everybody’s friend. You just did everything together.”

The directors agree that the team’s closeness has helped them stand out from the crowd.

“You can have a team that has great dancers but if they don’t have compassion for each other, it doesn’t work, no matter how good the dancers are,” Perez said.

Many of the members on the team plan to continue with dancing in college and beyond.

“Right now the dance world is so big, they can do anything,” King said. “They can be on shows or in music videos; they don’t have to stop because it’s the end of high school.”