From March 3-5, the Dominion High School Dance Team competed at the NDA High School National Championships in Orlando, FL. The team ended up taking 5^th out of 33 teams in the Large Varsity Hip Hop division, as well as 1^st place for Tech Excellence and recognition by the NDA staff for sportsmanship. All these awards didn’t come easy though.

Going into the competition, the team was planning on having one dancer, captain Evelyn Kim, out due to an illness. Already the team was trying to configure ways to balance out the routine with one dancer missing, when another dancer had to drop out due to an injured ankle. Because the routines were already made way in advance with the expectation of two other people performing, the other officers were scrambling to find ways to reconfigure the routine in a short amount of time.

It seemed like the problems just kept stacking up after that. Captain Emily Baires said, “There were lots of [minor] injuries” among the rest of the team, and they had to find a balance between pushing them and not further injuring them.

Adding more stress, the night of the preliminary competition in Florida, the team was up until 2 AM changing their dance to accommodate judge’s expectations. Baires said, “Without this officer’s meeting, I don’t think we would have moved up [in the rankings].”

Even with the odds stacked against them, the team still managed to bring a trophy back home to Dominion.