Nowhere to practice

This blog ties into my last post about “dance not being a real sport”

Yes football is a sport with a lot of physical contact and people get hurt, but dance is just as hard on our bodies. Blood, sweat, and tears are shed at practices, literally!! Like I said in my last blog, we practice anywhere from 6-30 hours a week. We run and or do some sort of cardio before every practice to get ourselves warmed up, then we stretch and get down to business working on our routines.

For starters we do not have a formal place to practice at Kennedy. We practice in the hallways, the cafeteria, and sometimes the choir room. None of these places are meant for dancing, especially for 20 girls! You're probably wondering why we don't go practice in the gym, but that’s where basketball and volleyball practice and they have priority over us. Because we cannot use the gyms, we had to result mainly to the cafeteria. We spend up to twenty minutes stacking the chairs and moving the tables out of the way so we have a big enough space for all of us to dance. The main problem with all the places we practice is that they all have concrete or tiling flooring. If you’ve seen some of our dances, you know that we drop down to our knees quite a bit in each dance. This adds a great effect and surprise to the dance, but especially on hard surfaces, it is terrible on our knees. We constantly have bruises on our knees. Along with the floor being hard on our knees, they are hard on our feet, ankles, and shins especially. We do a ton of jumps in every dance and when we land our feet smack the hard ground. This is especially hard on me because I have bad shin splints and stress fractures so the pain doesn’t ever really go away.

Dance team has never really had a place to practice, so we’re used to dancing on the hard surfaces and yeah they hurt our bodies and leave bruises, but we’re used to it, we’ve accepted that these are the results of dancing where we practice. The gym isn’t so bad on our bodies and it’s enough space for all of the team. We try and get in there as much as we can but it’s a rare occasion. Sometime in the future I hope the team gets an actual place to practice or we can compromise on sharing the gyms, but for now we’re just going to keep on doing what we’re doing and hope for the best.