How is the Viking Elite Spirit Team preparing for competition?

Picture of the girls after their first win in the Groove Virtual Competition. (Tabitha Haskins)

Picture of the girls after their first win in the Groove Virtual Competition. (Tabitha Haskins)

The Viking Elite Spirit Team has four competitions this year. The first one is on January 16th at TAPPS which is what they are focusing on and preparing for right now. Practice is taken much more seriously right now and the dancers are being pushed past their limits everyday. Here is how they are getting ready. 

They start off by stretching and warming up, however they need to be spread out and far away from each other so that there is no distractions and easier to focus on warming up their muscles so avoid injury. There is a new thing called ‘marks.’ Meaning a punishment for repeating the same mistakes. Everyday, Coach will take notes on mistakes/ corrections she notices in both routines that the team preforms at competition which is jazz and pom. If the same mistake is made tomorrow, that’s a mark. Marks can be a mistake by the whole team, or just one single person. Either way the whole team makes up for it. At the end of practice, the marks are counted up and that is how many sets of a workout they need to do. It’s a different workout everyday.

For example, if there was a total of four marks, and Coach picked mountain climbers for todays workout, we would do four sets of mountain climbers for how many seconds she would want us to. Marks aren’t always mistakes in the dance, but also for other things. Such as forgetting shoes/poms or not doing a task the Coach gives us on time. Some days the workouts are easy and other days the workouts are exhausting. Something else is that they can not have a drink of water until the Coach says so. 

“I am pushing them to the road of perfection,” says Tabitha Haskins, Coach of the Viking Elite Spirit Team. Atiana Henderson, athlete of the Spirit Team said, “Sometimes there are days where I feel like I’m going to pass out, but I know that I am getting stronger and becoming a better dancer.”

The Spirit Team has been working extremely hard. Thankfully they have each other to encourage one another to keep pushing.