In just one year, the N.C. State clogging club has grown from just seven members to 16, allowing the team to expand its image both on campus and throughout the clogging community.
Team Director Harriett Myers, a junior in biological sciences, said the great number of new faces on the squad makes being part of the club much more enjoyable.
“We are so happy with the growth of the team,” Myers said. “The best part is the variety of dancers we have. We recruited cloggers from many different backgrounds, and they each add something unique to the overall experience.”
The clogging club, unlike many other club sports, does not compete solely against other schools. In fact, only two other schools in the nation have competitive clogging teams: Mars Hill College and Brigham Young University. The Mars Hill team, known as the Bailey Mountain Cloggers, is extremely competitive and even awards scholarships for clogging.
Instead, the Wolfpack Cloggers, as State’s club is known in competition, compete in tournaments formed by an organization known as Cadence. While the tournaments themselves are hosted by teams around the South, Cadence forms a single set of rules for the competitions.
The skill levels of teams at the Cadence tournaments range from preschoolers to adults. Most of the competition that the Wolfpack faces is from studio teams from Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee.
The Wolfpack has already competed in three events last the fall, including the Hickory Hoedown, which is the second-largest event of the season after the national tournament.
Because of the club’s growth, the Wolfpack has been able to pick up new routines to bring to the competitions.
“We can compete in more dances at different levels,” Myers said. “Just the amount of people on the team makes performances easier to plan so that enough people can make it.”
One of the new routines the Wolfpack performs is a standing line dance. In this routine, teams can’t change their formation, and each person must perform the exact same dance.
“It’s really hard because any mistake is really noticeable,” Leslie Morris, a freshman in engineering, said. “It takes a lot of cleaning.”
Last Saturday, the clogging club hosted its 25th annual N.C. State Clogging Challenge at the Raleigh Convention Center. There were approximately 120 dances total and about 10 different teams at the all-day event.
What may be most impressive is that the 16-person State clogging team organized and hosted the entire event by themselves with no outside assistance. The girls arrived at the Convention Center at 6:30 a.m. and didn’t leave until 8 p.m.
“It’s a big deal for college students to put on an event like this,” Brittany Calloway, a freshman in human biology, said. “A lot went into it. We had to organize a lot of things.”
“At other events, it’s people’s jobs to put on the event,” Morris said. “But we’re students first, so it was a lot more for us.”
The club still has plenty to prepare for this spring, including the Bailey Mountian Clogging Challenge at Mars Hill, and the 2014 Cadence Nationals, hosted at Carowinds in Charlotte.
In addition to competitions, the club also regularly performs exhibitions around campus and at various locations in downtown Raleigh, which Myers said was one of her goals for the club.
“The growth of the team has really supported that goal,” Myers said. “[Our performances make] the community see that clogging is a growing sport and not just an old folk dance.”