State spirit sweep

LHS dance team reaches new heights with tougher routines

For the first time in school history, the Lovell High School dance team swept the categories at the Wyoming State Spirit Competition in Casper on January 23.

It was a great moment for a program steeped in tradition, having brought home many trophies over the years, but never two in the same year.

The LHS team won both the Hip Hop Dance and Jazz Dance categories in Class 3A under the guidance of first-year head coach Madison Hecker, repeating as the champion in Hip Hop Dance category.

Hecker herself was a member of the dance team for four years when she was Madison Reimers before her marriage, dancing for coach LaraLee Reber for three years and for coach Kari Angell her senior year before graduating in 2020.

When Angell retired after six years at the helm, Hecker applied for the job and was accepted, taking over the program last summer.

As the new coach, Hecker said she worked to do some different things with the team, especially in the jazz category, upping the tempo and pushing the team with more difficult technique rather than relying simply on precision.

For instance, she said, the jazz routine included a turn, tilt and firebird back-to-back-to-back, which she said is “pretty difficult to execute,” especially when the girls are tired in mid-routine. Some years in the past, she said, the team might leave out a difficult technique or perhaps go from a double turn to a single turn, but as the new coach, she wanted the team to stick with the difficult moves.

“I remember how that felt. It’s exhausting to perform, but I wanted to make a difference in our routines, so we stuck with the difficult aspects instead of pulling back purely to make it precise or looking clean,” Hecker said. “We didn’t want to pull back but wanted to keep pushing and get used to difficult routines like some of the bigger schools.”

There were difficult aspects in the hip hop routine, as well, including a part when the girls had to do a head spring, the coach said.

“It’s difficult, and at the first part of the season we had multiple girls who couldn’t do it, but by the end most of them (eight of 10) had it down, and by next year they all should be able to do it,” Hecker said. “I have a very determined group of girls. I’m very lucky. They never gave up and were determined to keep the hard aspects in the state routine. They worked hard on it all season.”

Long season

Dancers have a long season. Tryouts are held in the spring, and the team attends a camp with a choreographer from Utah in July. Then practice starts about a week before school, and the team members begin learning their state routines and regular game routines for halftime performances. The season doesn’t end until the end of regional basketball.

Members of the state competition team this year were senior Ella Spanier; juniors Avery Wardell, Caitlyn Allen, Candace Walker and Paige Spenny; sophomores Addie Weber, Bella Martinez, Juliette Caldwell and Kelce Winterholler; and freshman Kaycie Marberry. There were also three other members of the team who were not on the competition team.

All will have to try out again this spring, except for the graduating Spanier, if they want to dance next year, Hecker said, and she hopes to increase the number of dancers if there are more competing at tryouts.

Hard work

During the season the dance team practices for two hours after school, Monday through Thursday in the Lovell Elementary gym but will also do a Friday field or floor marking mini-practice before football or basketball performance weekends to make sure the girls know their spots for a particular routine.

As State Spirit approaches, the team will add Friday and Saturday full practices as needed, plus the floor marking work in the gym.

Hecker said the teams comes into the season with two state and two game routines, and this year the team pulled out a routine from the previous year that was choreographed by Spanier. They will also sometimes modify a current routine, for instance this year changing music and adding poms to an already learned routine.