They’ve Got Spirit, How About You?

The Maryville Spirit Pro­gram, which is com­prised of cheer, dance and mas­cots, work hard all year long to sup­port ath­let­ics and our in­sti­tu­tion as a whole, but once a year they take some time off for their own craft. Dur­ing the sec­ond week of April each year, cheer­lead­ing and dance teams from around the na­tion flock to Day­tona Beach, Florida, to com­pete in the Na­tional Cheer­lead­ing and Dance As­so­ci­a­tion’s col­lege com­pe­ti­tion. This year our teams per­formed ex­cep­tion­ally well and placed higher than ever.

Just Dance

There are many styles of dance, and the Na­tional Dance As­so­ci­a­tion (NDA) of­fers cat­e­gories for com­pe­ti­tion in many of them. This year our dance team com­peted in the jazz di­vi­sion, as well as team.

The team cat­e­gory al­lows dance teams to show­case three types of dance, in­clud­ing hip hop, jazz and pom, into a short two-minute rou­tine. This is only the sec­ond year the Maryville dance team has ap­peared in this cat­e­gory and they took third place, which is the new record for the pro­gram.

For the dance team, com­pet­ing in the jazz cat­e­gory is tra­di­tion and they have been do­ing so since the pro­gram started com­pet­ing na­tion­ally. This year, the team made it to fi­nals and placed ninth.

“Con­sid­er­ing it was my first year ever coach­ing, the team ex­ceeded any ex­pec­ta­tions that I had. I was go­ing into the trip that mak­ing fi­nals would be amaz­ing, but plac­ing well in fi­nals blew my mind,” said As­sis­tant Dance Coach Tay­lor Blu­men­thal. “See­ing the team and the progress they’ve made has been the best part of the jour­ney. I’d like to think I had a lit­tle to do with their progress, but most of it came from their own out­side work.”

Cheer on the cheer­lead­ers

The Na­tional Cheer­lead­ing As­so­ci­a­tion (NCA) has sev­eral cat­e­gories for com­pe­ti­tion as well. Our team com­petes in the small coed Di­vi­sion II cat­e­gory.

Every year, the team makes vast strides into push­ing the pro­gram to do big­ger and bet­ter things. This year, the cheer team made pro­gram his­tory by mak­ing fi­nals and plac­ing thir­teenth.

The fi­nals for com­pe­ti­tion are held out­side in the band­shell, or the gi­ant out­door stage. Ash­ley Stevens said, “The adren­a­line be­fore you run out on stage is un­real and per­form­ing on the out­door stage was a whole dif­fer­ent world.”

“First of all, thank you to Dr. Lombardi, but also Marcus Manning and everyone over in Athletics…and all my counterparts in Student Life.  We, as an institution, have bought into one team one family, and through that the support system we have here for our students at Maryville, [it] is amazing and humbling to me.”

-Peter Michel

All pho­tos cour­tesy of Jor­dan Coker.