As I entered the hotel alongside my fellow members of the Boston University Dance Team, slightly suffocated by the toxic hairspray fumes occupying every cubic inch of the building, I couldn’t help but immediately feed off of the nervous energy and tension in the air. For hundreds of collegiate dance and cheer teams, the two short minutes they would spend on the floor at the preliminary competition would be the end of the journey they had dedicated their entire season to. Coming off of a national championship win from the previous year, we had potent, mixed emotions going into the competition. We were excited to finally be showing off what we had worked so long and hard on but at the same time we were incredibly nervous knowing how stiff the competition was and how much these few days meant to us. We had such incredibly high expectations for ourselves, especially the first and second-year members of the team since we simply didn’t know what it was like to be on a national championship-winning team.
While dancing has always been my thing, the world of collegiate dance teams was foreign to me until this year. It is a completely different breed of dance, resembling very little of what I used to be familiar with and what was drilled into my body. The objective is to completely and entirely synchronize with the team, exhibiting fantastic visual feats as a unit, moving as one. The artistry is in the choreography; no longer is it within the individual dancer. Somehow, 23 girls of varying body types and dance backgrounds come together and conform to one another so that every detail is in place and not distracting from the overarching visual.
Besides the style, the competition itself is like no other. While a lot of dancers and cheerleaders in high school are used to competing or performing about once a month, collegiate teams work for the entire year to get to that finals floor perched on the sandy shore of sunny Daytona Beach, Florida. At the National Cheer and Dance Association (NCA and NDA) Collegiate Cheer and Dance Championship, everything boils down to those few moments which have worked so incredibly hard for. Everywhere you look, there is a cheerleader or dancer embracing a teammate, families roaring in support for their loved ones on stage, and makeup running down devastated or crying faces. In the grand scheme of things, it’s all incredibly meaningless, yet in the moment, it means everything.
We ended up getting second place. However, what’s more important is that we were granted the massive amount of privilege that allows us to be disappointed in the results. There is technically only one other team in the whole country that happened to be having a better day than us, yet we still don’t feel fulfilled because we were so close to being the best.
That’s what is so incredibly insane about collegiate dance and cheer teams. Competition results are so relative to each team. They have so much weight but in reality, they mean absolutely nothing. As we were leaving the preliminary competition, dissatisfied with where we were placed going into the final competition, a team sitting next to us was crying tears of joy, honored to be given the chance to compete again with sixth place posing as a sweet victory. Meanwhile, the BU Dance Team simply expected to make it all the way through, headed to become disappointed with being named second in the nation. What a privilege.
Looking back on the competition and the hundreds of hours of practice spent for it all to climax and end within the blink of an eye, I can’t stop thinking about the parallels with the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of sand mandalas, where beautifully intricate mandalas are made out of sand taking hours and hours, all to just be destroyed after its completion. With so much significance placed on the final product, only to be seen for a matter of seconds, it is so very important to find the value of the experience in the journey, not in the final presentation of it. Second place definitely shouldn’t be a source of disappointment, however more importantly, it shouldn’t mean anything at all. Only we know what we went through to get there and that should always be enough.
