In the world of competitive dance the N.C. State dance team is consistently nationally ranked. This is the hard work, dedication and sometimes heartbreak that results from such intense competition.
Amanda Ladd, a junior in communication, can’t talk about dance without a beaming smile. For Ladd, everything about dance — kicks, spins, leaps, pirouette — morphs into her art form, working as an outlet of expression.
“My favorite part of it is performance,” she said. “When you are in costume, make up, hair done and you are at the place where you are going to compete, and you’re about to step on that stage with the judges right in front of you.
That is what I love the most. That is what I live for.”
But performance is only a small part of dance and intense commitment accompanies the thrill of the stage. Ladd began dancing once a week, at age seven. And now at age 20, she is a member of the elite NCSU Red dance team, practicing for three hours a day, four days a week, plus shaking her thing for football and basketball games — along with helping the team place third at the national championships.
Ladd’s story is one of success. Battling tryouts and practice the past three years, she made the Red and national teams Ñ- an accomplishment shared with Caroline King, a junior in business education, and Leigh Justice, a junior in communication.
But dance rarely culminates with such success. For every experience like Ladd’s there are many who didn’t quite make it. Many who still practice and still yearn for their time in the national spotlight. Ladd’s roommate, Amanda Ting, a junior in biological sciences and chemistry, embodies the role of those dancers who haven’t made it. At least not yet.
Ting made the dance team her freshman and sophomore years, but at spring tryouts last year she didn’t make the cut.
“I just need to work harder, that is all,” Ting said about being back on the team. “I hope to [try out this fall]. I’m going to spend this summer working on myself as a whole.”
But even with the heartache, Ting said she still wholeheartedly supports Ladd.
“She’s the s— , so take a whiff,” Ting said.
The beginnings
A long road stretches in front of little girls with dreams of dancing grandeur, but some begin so young that those dreams develop after the skills have begun to take hold.
“I began dancing when I was three years old,” King said. “I’ve done everything from tap, jazz, lyrical — everything.”
Three comes across as the median age of these top dancers. Justice and Ashley Beasley, a sophomore in biological sciences and a second-year Red team performer, both also began dancing at three as did Ting.
Usually girls begin with ballet and then branch out into the more advanced dances.
“But I started in tap,” Ting laughed. “I’m an individual.”
Amongst the many girls who became tutu clad at three, Ladd also stands out as an individual. She didn’t begin dancing until seven, and only because of a fluke.
In the middle of playtime one afternoon, Ladd’s friend had to go to dance class and invited her along. A small class and gracious instructor allowed her to participate and Ladd got hooked.
“After that I was like, ‘mommy and daddy — I want to dance,'” Ladd said.
Only a year after her first class Ladd began competitive dance. Ballet, tap, jazz and lyrical — dance took over her life. Occasionally her studio would compete in a sort of gymnastic dance — acro — that Ladd described as, “not serious gymnastics, just little dance routines.”
“Acro or open means like back handsprings and flips and stuff,” Ting said.
Dance soon became an overwhelming factor in Ladd’s life. By high school she danced four hours a day, four days a week and Saturday dance time could only be interrupted by family or school events. But for her it remained a labor of love, paying off in various awards.
At competitions dance companies award first, second and third or platinum, gold and silver. Ladd’s teams normally won first or platinum, but she refuses to take all the credit. She praised her coach’s hard workouts as the reason for her successes.
The dream team
The NCSU dance team is made up of two smaller teams, the White and Red teams. Traditionally, the White team runs the first year girls into shape and the Red team works all the veterans.
“I tried out in the fall of my freshman year,” Ladd said. “And they read the list, like these are the people who made it: red teamÉso-and-so, so-and-so, and I was like waitÉwhat team am I on? What is the difference?”
Ladd made the Red team that first year, and every year since. But the first year on either team can prove incredibly intimidating as the new girls try to learn State’s sharp, precision-conscious technique.
Most girls come from studio dancing, which offers much more free, personal style in dance.
“I had to get used to doing different arms for leaps and stuff instead of making things flowy,” Ladd said. “It had to go from being flowy to being sharp. That was kind of hard for me, but I got it down. I can defiantly see it every year when people come in. I’m like aw, they’re getting caught on the same thing I got caught on.”
Once on the team the girls bond not only from the intense dance sessions, but also from excessive running. Ladd likes to joke about being on the track team. This year the new coach Erika McInnis implemented a rule for dancing at games: dancers had to run a seven-and-a-half-minute mile at least once.
A dancer on the NCSU dance team from 1998 until 2002, McInnis is this first dance team coach in four years to continue for more than one season. The stream of new coaches over the past few years caused a choppy dynamic for some of the dancers, because with new coaches come new policies. “It has always kind of been the norm that if you’ve been on the team for x amount of years, you make it again,” Ting said about veteran status. “That is usually how it is, but it’s not like a rule.”
And last spring when tryouts cut Ting and another veteran, they said they felt more than just shocked.
“It was so hard because I had to work so hard my freshman year and it paid off,” Ting said. “And then to work really hard your sophomore year and for it to not pay off is just horrible; it hurt. It hurt really bad. And it hit pretty hard.”
For the past two years, nobody at tryouts is safe. This past weekend McInnis cut three veterans. She is determined to bring the NCSU dance team back to the top of the national rankings.
“What we need are strong assets,” Ladd said. “Because we don’t want anybody who is going to hold us back.”
Breaking stereotypes
The dance team is one of the most consistent teams on campus. Close to every year they break into the top 10 at nationals, this year winning third and breaking the four year curse of seventh place. State won second place twice with McInnis on the team. And yet, all campus sees of the dance team is a bunch of pretty girls performing high school cheerleading moves at ball games.
“All we really get is that little space at the end zone or on the basketball courts where we do cadences to get the crowd going,” Beasley said. “But what we really are capable of people can’t see.”
What students do see are the girls in midriffs and black pants, shaking their pom pons to the music’s beat. The dance team’s style does revolve around these sharp movements to create its signature style, but its actual dance routines contain much more than booty shaking.
A routine for nationals consists of two minutes and fifteen seconds of pure athleticism. Fifteen seconds for intro, 30 seconds for jazz, 30 seconds for funk and 30 seconds for pom and then a 15-second outro. All the time in perfect toe-touching, pirouette synchronism.
“We had a lot of tricks, too. We had people doing double toe-touches,” Ladd said as she lifts her legs above her head while seated in some kind of freakish flexibility demonstration. “Doing two in a row is really hard because you have to go up and down and up and down. So when you’re at that point in the dance and your legs are hurting, it is really hard.”
During her third time performing with the NCSU dance team at nationals, many of the team tricks included Ladd. She not only did the double toe-touching, she also preformed leg spins, holding her leg a split and turning.
The commitment Ladd gave over the years is shown in what she has accomplished today, and she couldn’t be happier with her success. All the years of hard work and intense passion have paid off, and she still has one year left on the team to continue giving dance 110 percent.
“The same heart and dedication and passion that you need as football players is the same thing you have to has as a dancer,” McInnis said as a reminder. “We work just as hard as anybody else. We are always working really hard, and we’re not just walking around in crop-tops trying to look cute.”
