Deetya Mudumba

The dance team takes its formation on the field during the football game. The dance team regularly performs at all the home football games. “[Although] it’s been a while since we’ve performed it, [our game day routine is] pretty short and simple, and I think we’re prepared,” senior captain Holly Huang said.

On Friday, Oct. 24, the Jefferson dance team performed a show during halftime at the 40th anniversary football game. Many people attended the game, including Jefferson alumni. For this football game, they focused on a pom and pop style of dance.

“We don’t have a lot of football games this season, so it was a really nice experience to perform today, even though it was pretty cold,” junior captain Grace Yuan said. “I think the performance itself went pretty well. And it was nice after not performing it for so long.”

The team practices every Tuesday and Thursday for two hours each. Choreographers also have to spend additional time choreographing the dance.

“We usually learn the choreography in around one or two practices per dance, and then before a performance or competition, we spend practice cleaning each dance,” senior captain Holly Huang said. “When it’s the day before, we run through all the dances.

During practices, the team faced many challenges and roadblocks while learning choreography, such as missing counts or forgetting steps, due to their coach being on temporary leave. There were times when the team had to spend more time just to get down one part of their routine. However, they eventually overcame all of these obstacles.

“There’s definitely [been] a few times where we’re not sure what the movements are,” Yuan said. “We have a new replacement coach right now, and she’s great, but sometimes it’s a little bit hard to understand what the original coach meant for the choreography. We do figure it out at the end.”

The team has extra Friday practices due to more competitions and performances throughout the school year.

“We usually perform at all the home football games and all the home basketball games,” Huang said. “There were also [homecoming] pep rally routines.”

Along with performances in school, the team will be going to numerous competitions this year.

Aside from competing and performing, the team is a tight-knit group. They often do spirit days, hold school events and post about their upcoming performances on social media.

The team has many goals for this season, but the main goal is to have a good time and create strong bonds.

“A lot of the movements [in our choreo] are really cool when they’re put together by the whole team, and when we do it together, it looks really good,” Yuan said. “We really want to have lots of fun [this season].”