All of my life I’ve been an athlete. I started t-ball when I was four and I never looked back. I played a few sports here and there throughout my elementary school days (soccer, cheerleading and golf), but when I moved from Columbia to Kansas City I found dance: and the rest is history.
I joined a small studio in Independence, Missouri when I was in fourth grade. Little did I know Cathy’s Creative Dance would become my second home for the next 14 years. When it started I was taking one ballet class a week, the basics, and enjoying every minute of it. I learned things that year, like tondués and pliés, but most importantly I learned that ballet is the backbone of all dance. By the time our recital rolled around, I was more than excited for my family to come watch me shine on stage. Of course like any first time athlete, I was a nervous wreck, but I pulled through. After that I continued to take more classes during the school years and the summer, and three years later I auditioned for the competition team. Show Troupe, as they call it, are the girls everyone looks up to. Not only can they turn for hours and leap for days, but it seemed like they were on top of the world. My dance family really welcomed me. They taught me the ropes and continued to help me improve. I never made the dance team for my high school, like the other girls did, because I went to a large school with a small team. It never really bothered me that I missed out on experiences the other girls had. I was perfectly happy. After years of traveling the country and the state, it came time to graduate and move on to college.
The graduating class of 2014 at Cathy’s Creative Dance Studio was seven people. The six people I had been dancing with since I was 12 were about to leave and disperse all over the state. Needless to say, the last time we danced together was very emotional. Everyone was ready to move on into the collegiate level of dancing, except me.
Unlike my teammates, I went to a huge high school, graduating with over 500 other people, and when I moved onto college, I didn’t want that. I chose to attend a very small school close to home and I love being an Avila Eagle. Avila’s dance team, the Glitter Girls, is a nationally ranked team. Part of me didn’t want to try out due to the heartbreak of not making yet another school's dance team. The other part of me knew it was time to move on and try something new. My second semester of my freshman year of college I took dance classes at school for fun and it was a blast. That year I had realized how much I had truly missed dancing. During those classes, the girls on the dance team constantly complained about their practice times, their busy schedule and their intense coaches. That’s when I realized I knew I had made the right decision by not dancing in college (at the time I was working three jobs and trying to maintain my GPA and focusing more on my major).
Now I’m a sophomore and the managing editor of Avila’s school magazine the Talon. I absolutely love my major and what I’m doing with my life, but I wouldn’t be the same without my dance family. I don’t regret dancing, but I also don’t regret not continuing, either.
