The Owatonna Dance Team started back in 2017, over the past five years the team has exponentially grown not only in size but improvement in their skills and performances. The team is currently finishing up preseason getting ready for their competitive season to start at the end of October.

Over the summer during preseason the team attended a high school dance camp in Brainerd, Minnesota. This camp gave the team a chance to improve their skills and challenge themselves with high level classes. Senior captain Annika Wiese stated, “It was a great way to work on bonding as well as getting stronger as a team.” Moving forward into the competitive season, senior captain Lainie Rahn said, “One of the main goals for this season is to improve the score sheets every weekend. It was really hard to do that last year because of competitions being so time consuming.” Scoresheets are used to evaluate performances and determine placements at each competition. The team uses these score sheets as a challenge to better themselves as a whole.  

Head coach Ms. Nicole Burgmaier is  excited for the upcoming season. Burgmaier said, “Over the summer I would say, a lot of girls worked really really hard on conditioning and technique, which is something that I hope that continues throughout seasons and teams for all of our dancers.” Burgmaier has used the summer preseason to watch the team grow as a whole and get to know the rookies. Watching them over the summer and how hard working this team is, she cannot wait to see what they do during the competitive season and how many accomplishments they will make. 

The team is hoping with halftime performances that it will help the school support the dance team more at competitions. Senior captain Stephanie Hager said, “They always say our kicks are fascinating, it’s so cool to watch you guys. It’s good that they’re watching us even if it’s just at halftime performances, the support is so nice.” 

Hearing the crowd cheering on is so helpful, it really gets their adrenaline pumping even more to finish out an amazing performance. Rahn stated, “It’s gonna go amazing, we’ve been wanting to do the homecoming performance for years, and we never have been able to. So we’re really excited and people are excited to see it. I think there’s gonna be a bigger student section for the homecoming game, so they’ll go crazy and they’ll love it.”

On Saturday, Sept. 25 the team performed at halftime of the football game to their pom routine “Don’t Stop The Music,” that took third place at camp during the home routine competition. Since then they have cleaned the dance, added a hip hop portion at the end and have announced they will be performing again during the halftime show at the homecoming football game on Friday, Oct. 8 at 7 p.m.