This Gig Harbor team is fighting for gym time, respect and its first state title
Gig Harbor High School’s H2Whoa dance team is ready for a state title.
Members of the team believed they were on track in 2020 to become state champions for the first time in the nearly 20 years the team has been around. They’d been scoring as the highest 3A hip-hop team.
Then the pandemic hit.
“Basically, everything was completely unfinished,” said Shay Levine, who is in her first year coaching the team. “We haven’t had a state since, right? So they never got to see what happened.”
Gig Harbor dancers fought to keep the team together, had tryouts and started meeting again in June.
“We’re going to be competitive,” Levine, who also coaches the Seattle Storm Dance Troupe, remembers telling the team. “We’re going to work so hard that state champs is the only option for us.”
The district competition is March 12, and the team hopes to advance to the state competition March 26. The team has a hip-hop routine and a contemporary dance routine.
Meanwhile, the team competed at nationals for the first time last month and placed in the top 10. (Washington is one of the only places where the state competition happens after nationals).
Overcoming adversity has been a theme for the program.
One of the dancers got sick an hour before the team’s preliminary performance at nationals. Down from eight to seven, the dancers reconfigured their formation last-minute to make it work.
The team already was smaller than other teams who traveled to Orlando, Florida for the competition. Others in the category competed with 11 dancers.
“They went out and absolutely blew it away with their performance,” Levine said. “To the untrained eye, you would have never known that we were missing someone.”
They were still walking out for their final performance when their music started prematurely. It didn’t stop them. They hurried on and ended up placing ninth.
“Given that dance is a full-time sport, with no real off-season, being a part of this team means 100 percent commitment as both an athlete and a performer,” junior Hayden Estler said. “We have become such a successful team because all of our girls are passionate about dance and go the extra mile to make themselves as well as our team the best possible versions that we can be.”
Gig Harbor traveled to nationals with a small group, but they had support from other Western Washington folks.
Parents and others who traveled with Tumwater’s dance team formed a tunnel to cheer on the Gig Harbor athletes as they finished their performance.
The sportsmanship in dance and support from fellow coaches is significant, Levine said.
Support from the top
The school principal and district superintendent happened to walk in during one of the team’s first practices last year.
“They were so positive, they were so encouraging,” Levine said. “They were just like: ‘We can’t wait to cheer you guys on.’”
Team members took a photo with the women and told their coach when they left that they’d never felt so much support from people in such positions of power.
When Levine was trying to figure out what she needed to do to take the team to nationals, it was the superintendent’s office that walked her through it.
“Her assistant was so helpful to me,” Levine said. “… I don’t think we would have gone to nationals if it wasn’t for the superintendent and principal being very supportive of the program.”
The team performed at the school board meeting in February.
“In the past, we have not been taken as seriously as other sports, and many people do not feel competitive dance is a sport,” Estler said. “Although this is still an issue that we face and are fighting to fix, our amazing coach Shay has done a great job of advocating for equality and respect from the school, the students and school officials. This year has been the best so far in terms of receiving fair treatment from our school staff. Our new principal and vice principal as well as the school board have been very supportive and fulfilling our needs as best as they can.”
‘A serious athletic sport’
They’re up against other sports and activities for gym time and often are forced to make do elsewhere. That’s a problem all dance teams face, Levine said.
“We’re constantly practicing in the commons and hallways, anywhere,” she said. “Sometimes we’ve had to practice outside.”
The makeshift space is challenging, freshman Faith Berry said.
“It messes with our minds when we have to go perform,” she said.
What they get critiqued on most often at competitions is the spacing in their routines.
“That is purely because we have not had enough gym time,” Levine said.
The lines on the gym floor help determine precisely who needs to be where.
Instead, the Gig Harbor team often sets up tables to block off the school commons, mops the floor and makes that a dance studio.
“We can get upset, or we can problem solve,” Levine said.
When they get kicked out of the commons, they find a hallway – which is where they ended up for both practices last week as they prepared for the district competition.
“We are still practicing in the commons/lunchroom the majority of the time, and we have no access at the school to mirrors, dance floors and other equipment that is vital to having the best practices we can,” Estler said. “It is time that people treat competitive dance as what it is: a serious athletic sport. We are athletes that train just as hard as any other team, and we will continue to fight for the respect we deserve.”
When athletes from other sports kept interrupting practice in the commons, walking through the studio, Levine marched into those athletes’ practices to put an end to it.
She wouldn’t interrupt their practices again, she told the teams, if they stopped interrupting hers.
The dancers love that story.
“It kind of scared some sense into them,” Berry said.
The dancers now ask other students not to walk through practices.
“They say it in this confident, strong voice,” Levine said. “They’re just handling it themselves.”
That makes her proud.
The road to state
Outside of practice, Levine gives the team dance homework, and members learn about the history of hip-hop.
“We try to be really respectful of the culture that hip-hop encompasses,” said Levine, who said she and the team recognize they are “guests in this environment.”
The team is mostly white, Levine said, and she hopes “to grow, especially in the diversity of our dancers.”
They’ve also focused on mentally preparing for competition. One of the dance moms is a therapist, Levine said, and helped put on a mental health workshop for the team in the fall. They made vision boards about their individual and team goals and talked about coping with anxiety and the stress of school and the pandemic.
“That was very powerful as a team because we kind of just opened up,” Berry said.
She’s excited for districts.
“I want people to know that dance isn’t something that you just throw out there and do what you feel like it,” Berry said. “It’s way more than that. We want to win. … We eat, sleep and breath dance. That’s our life.”
Their stiffest competition, Levine said, is Lakes High School (which has won state about seven times) and Capital High School.
“I’m like a football coach,” she said. “I have a spreadsheet of all the scores from Washington state.”
The school district classifies dance as an activity, Levine said, but she’d like to see it classified as a sport. Districts and state are run and sanctioned by the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association.
Gig Harbor is currently the highest scoring 3A hip-hop team in the state, she said. Their most recent hip-hop score, from a Feb. 12 competition at Lakes, was 268 out of 300 — the highest out of 44 performances that day.
They’re shooting for the high 270s or low 280s in hip-hop at the district competition.
Their goal is to win state in hip-hop, and Levine thinks they have a good chance of being first-time state champs in the dance category as well, with their contemporary routine.
“They’re all confident,” she said. “They’re all lifting each other up. … They’re really, truly athletes.”
This story was originally published March 6, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
