Rigorous practices are full of running drills that consume every free hour of the week. Exercises are strategically designed to strengthen and increase the team’s endurance. Competition is high-pressure with an audience constantly searching for mistakes. As a team, everyone works cohesively toward victory.
You might read this description and immediately think of sports like football, basketball or soccer.
But what if I told you it’s actually about dance?
The four years I spent on my high school’s dance team taught me lessons that have shaped who I am today. I learned about the importance of perseverance, teamwork and dedication.
I also learned dance is a sport that often goes unrecognized.
Dance is an artistic expression of an emotion or idea through movement. It gives shape to feelings that can’t be conveyed verbally. But while dance is incredibly artistic, it also has an athletic side that would be naive to discredit.
While some Florida counties consider high school dance a sport, my school was part of the group that doesn’t include it in their athletics departments. The reasoning is this: Not all high schools compete, so it’s classified as an extension of the arts. As a result, dancers don’t have the same resources allocated to traditional sports teams.
My coach struggled to get a regular and safe space for us to practice. Without access to a dedicated athletic space, we were demoted to running drills in the school cafeteria.
The standard dance floor is made of marley, a specialized vinyl material that provides traction and safety. The cafeteria floor was marble, which was not the best to execute tricks on because it was slippery and painful to fall on.
But even the cafeteria wasn’t guaranteed to us. Although we were granted a time slot, our practice space was sometimes occupied by employee celebrations, club meetings and ROTC drills. I will forever be thankful for my coaches' endless dedication to making sure we always had a place to practice, even if it wasn’t a traditional dance studio.
We also didn’t have transportation for away games. Typically, dance teams will sideline football games — including away games. The football and cheer teams had buses to transport them, but my team needed a parent-led carpool schedule to make sure we could still perform. A huge responsibility was placed on the parents and coaches to ensure we could safely get to high schools up to 40 minutes away.
Many recognized high school teams don’t have to worry about practice spaces and transportation. Just because dance has not traditionally been recognized as a sport doesn’t give schools a reason to leave it out.
Like various sports, dancers train for hours daily, mixing strengthening and conditioning. Dancers need to be athletic to execute movements and tricks successfully. My coach used to make us run laps around the parking lot to build our stamina, a drill common in most sports.
Dancing for three minutes may not seem exhausting, but it is. Dancers have to give 110% throughout a dance, engaging every muscle in their body to perfectly execute each move. Getting tired in the middle of a dance is not an option; it can result in injuries or mistakes.
Competitions are also incredibly cutthroat. Dancers practice one or two dances for months ahead of a competition. Dances are meticulously choreographed to fit the team’s style and talent, and they’re often created by paid professional choreographers.
Besides school performances, the entire dance season is spent training and preparing for competitions. Some districts have even established feeder middle schools to train dancers for high school competitions. Dancers put in just as much effort as — if not more than — sports teams in preparing for competition.
So, if dancers have to train just as hard as other athletes, why isn’t dance considered a sport?
High school dance teams deserve to be treated with the same respect as traditional sports teams. Dancers shouldn’t have to worry about practice spaces and transportation when many other athletic teams don’t. They should be given the same opportunities. High school dance teams train too hard to be excluded from athletic departments.
The mindset that dance is only a form of art needs to be abandoned. It is so much more than that.
Dance is an art, and it’s most definitely a sport.
Contact Ella Finkelstein at efinkelstein@alligator.org. Follow her on X @Ellamfink.
