MIT 2007 Ballroom Competition Recap

Last weekend, MIT held its 2007 Open Ballroom Dance Competition conveniently just ten minutes from my new apartment. It was a real pleasure to see fellow teammates and competitors from around the country, and everyone had a blast!

Before the Competition

Amy, Lance, Libby, and Tracey stayed the night on Friday night so as to cut out an early morning commute from Connecticut, and we all had a wonderful time together. On the morning of the competition, we headed out at a comfortable 7AM and arrived with well more than enough time to get ready before the show got rolling.

Results

Overall, we did way better than expected. I had hoped for a few callbacks and instead came away with a few ribbons. Commenting to Lina, I said that MIT ribbons aught to count for double points given the amount of competition. There’s no two ways about it – the competition was huge. With close to 200 couples competing in Bronze, we were completely outclassed in most of the events come the later rounds.

Note: Some data is still missing, as there were apparently some data mixups after the competition. Once said data is made available online, the table above will be updated appropriately.

Several things are a bit strange about our results lately, as characterized in the table above. Firstly, that we do better in Smooth than in Standard is perplexing to me – we almost never practice Smooth, and all of our technique (as well as most of our steps) is stolen straight from Standard. Secondly, that we did well in Bolero is an amazement, given that we only ever dance Bolero at competitions!

Reactions

Lina and I both very much enjoyed the two-day competition, as exhausting as it was. I really don’t think we could have danced much better than we did in most of those rounds, and am overall very happy with how things went. After the competition was over, we were able to catch a quick word with Mark Sheldon (one of the judges, as well as our Standard coach), who was also pleased overall.

Media

More important than the immediate results themselves, we made MIT an opportunity to improve our dancing by asking Lance to tape every round of our dancing that he possibly could. With the help of Lance, Mary, and Amy, we were able to catch almost every dance. Even upon a first glance of the footage, Lina and I have identified a number of posture- and frame-related issues to work on, as well as a number of steps that we’d like to go over with either Lance or one of our coaches. As an aside, I even extracted some photos from the video clips!

Looking Forward

Well, MIT brings this Ballroom season to a close. Cocky as it may be, I’m really looking forward to competing at the Silver level next season. My first hope is that we don’t lie stagnant in Silver for a few years, though that seems to be a trend. We’ll obviously be competing Bronze at the competitions that have no timeout, until we’re pointed out, but we have now officially timed out of Bronze. This means that we’ll need to clean up our continuity for Smooth and perhaps pick up some new steps for Standard, Rhythm and Latin. More lessons, please!