Joe Fletcher
Equinox Staff
The Keene State Dance Team has a tradition not many of the Owl’s sports teams have the privilege to have: traveling to Walt Disney World in Orlando, FL, for the Universal Dance Association (UDA) College Nationals.
Hundreds of schools would attend this competition for a weekend of dancing, competing and enjoying “the most magical place on earth” in-between. This season’s finals are going to look a little different this year, though. While there are nationals, the Owls aren’t going to be around any palm trees this year. While other schools will be making the trip, team captain Kimberly Kalis said the school decided it was in the best interest to not attend the competition due to COVID-19.
“We will be competing virtually so there’s definitely a different process in that sense but there’s still a good number of teams going to Florida,” said Kalis.
The process is going to be a new one that these dancers have not experienced before. Instead of the excitement of dance day and competing in front of a large crowd, the Owls are going to be competing in Spaulding Gymnasium and filming the performance. Junior Lauren Pearce is looking on the bright side considering the circumstances.
“It’s the best that we can do,” Pearce said. “It gives the seniors a last year to compete, it gives the freshman a little insight of what we can do. I don’t think anyone’s genuinely happy with it, but it’s COVID year.”
The dance team is a student-run organization. They don’t have any coaches, just a student-run executive board which handles several different affairs with the school. For a competition that’s never been done virtually before, the student-run team has a big task on their hands to not only compete, but to execute the virtual competition all together.
“We definitely have had their [KSC’s] support, but the paperwork is really something that I fill out with our manager, we raise the money for it, we do get help from Janet [Stevenson] in student accounts, and she helps out with the financial aspect of it.
The cool thing about attending a big dancing competition in Disney is the amount of schools competing. In the division Keene would usually compete in, there would be 12 fellow schools. This year, there will only be three others.
“Keene State College dance team is open hip-hop, that’s our division name,” Kalis said. “We will not be competing against anybody who is open hip-hop that is in Florida, just the people that are virtual.”
Not being able to go to Disney is one thing. Not having a competition at all, however, is one that just wouldn’t sit right. Marisa Crovo, a senior, is happy to at least have a competition where she could end her collegiate dancing career on a high note.
“We all came together last semester and three of us are seniors, so we want to at least do something, we want to dance, it’s our last season. We just don’t want to not do anything,” Crovo said. “So we found out that UDA was offering it virtually so we were like ‘why not’ it’s something to work towards.”
Joe Fletcher can be contacted at:
jfletcher@kscequinox.com
