For the past few months, the Dance Team has been working their way to Wells Fargo Arena in Des Moines, where the state dance championships are held. It has been a crazy year. Every sport is hoping to be able to compete. Speaking to the seniors on the dance team, Jayden Everson, Ellie Huginin, Tessa Bartell, and myself (Ansley Boorn) included. It seemed that state went pretty well this year.

The girls shared their thoughts about going to state this year. Ellie said, “Going into State I was pretty nervous about our performance because three people were missing and there was a lot of stress out on us.”  This thought seemed to be a common pattern considering Jayden had said “I was a little nervous but the thought of not that many people being there due to COVID restrictions made it easier to calm down before performing”. And Tessa claimed, “I felt confident in what we were given by the coaches, but there were three missing girls, and I didn’t know how it was going to affect us at state.”

Considering the feelings they had going into state, it was then asked to compare how it ended up turning out. Tessa said, “I thought it went very well considering we didn’t have the whole team there, I thought it was going to be rough”. With that being said here was Jayden’s response “Since we had three girls quarantined the week of state I was anxious to see how we would do with the changes we couldn’t make to the dance”. Ellie seemed to be pretty satisfied as well by saying “I think it went a lot better than I originally thought it would, we did really good and now it’s just up to the judges.”

With Covid affecting many things this year, there was going to be some obvious differences in how things ran this year compared to previous years. The girls seemed to appreciate the fact that they got to go to state. However, considering it was their final year it was disappointing not getting the entire experience. The crowd had a major decrease due to the restrictions and according to Jayden “It was kinda sad that there weren’t many people there, and we couldn’t stay as long as we usually do to watch dances”. Ellie mentioned “Well some of the more obvious things were that there was a significantly less amount of people and we performed with masks. State was also a lot sooner than past years, so that took away some prep time.” Tessa claimed “Not having awards in person felt different, we didn’t get the positive atmosphere we usually have during awards, and dancing in masks was something I’d never thought I would do. We also couldn’t watch any other performances we had to leave the arena right after we danced so it took away from a lot of the fun.”

Although the experience was not the same as years before the girl gave it their all and are hoping to hear good words from the judges as results will be released on December 5th.