For the Long Beach State dance team, the competitions come second; what is meaningful is the time they spend together preparing for them.
“We don’t think about placing,” coach Rey Lozano said. “We think about how we grow as a team and how we challenge ourselves.”
The team of 11 women is a tight-knit group that spends countless hours practicing routines and performing at various competitions and games.
“Dancers are like our own species,” Angela Mattern said. “Just like any other sport there is something hard to understand about dancing unless you go through it. So we share a special bond working hard together for a common goal.”
The mirrored dance studio on campus seemed more like a home to the women; the team acted more like a family. Their sisterly camaraderie came out as the team laughed and joked through warm-up stretches led by Lozano on the creaking hardwood floor. The team enjoys having fun, but when they step out on the floor, it is all business.
The team recently placed second in the jazz category at the 2011 Universal Dance Association College National Championship held at ESPN’s Wide World of Sports Complex in Orlando, Fla. Cal State Fullerton took first place in the competition of 25 by edging out CSULB by one point. The teams are judged in three categories: technicality – which looks at the difficulty and execution of the dance moves, synchronization of the dancers and showmanship.
The dance team also placed ninth in the hip-hop competition, the first time in school history that the team entered the category.
Entering both competitions turned out to be a grueling but rewarding task. The team started Saturday morning at 5 a.m. and competed three times – two preliminary dances and one dance in the jazz finals – before leaving the crowd-filled arena at 11 p.m.
“It was a physical and emotional rollercoaster,” Mattern said. CSULB was one of few teams in the division that participated in both the jazz and hip-hop competitions.
Each year, coach Lozano, who has been coaching at CSULB for 30 years, and his team come up with a new routine to bring to the national competition.
“We switch up the style and the theme because I want them to grow as dancers,” Lozano said.
Lozano said many of his dancers will try out in dance studios or try to make it in Hollywood as dancers after graduating, so the goal is to have them leave as well-rounded dancers.
Part of this new routine every year is innovation and risk taking — aspects which Lozano and his team take pride in doing. After analyzing other teams’ routines from the previous year’s competition, Lozano looks at what is not being done and what boundaries can be pushed. In this year’s jazz competition, Lozano incorporated country music into the routine, a genre that has gained mainstream popularity with listeners, but has gone largely untapped in the collegiate dance world. The move paid off, earning the team second place.
The inventiveness of dancing keeps Lozano going back into his creative well and, after 30 years, it still hasn’t gotten old.
“Dancing keeps you from aging,” Lozano said. “You can never run out of ideas; you are always being stimulated and you get to work with new people each year, so it keeps it fresh.”
Bianca Poncedeleon is in her third year with the team and enjoys the challenge of tackling a new style with each routine.
“It gives you the feeling that you are accomplishing something new,” she said.
Dancing is a year-round sport for the team as they perform at games, community events like the Christmas parade, and campus events like Smorgasport. Their three-day-a-week practice schedule gets amped up to two-a-day during winter in preparation for the national competition in January. Tuesday’s practice was the first time the women have seen each other since the competition, where they spent all of their time together — practicing, competing and hitting the roller coasters at Walt Disney World.
“We were with each other the entire time,” Poncedeleon said. “We know the best and the worst in each other.”
The dance team will bring their hip-hop routine, complete with red and blue Puma shoes that redefine the word hi-top, to Saturday’s basketball game against rival Fullerton at the Walter Pyramid at 7:30 p.m.
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