21The Oregon club dance team won its first national championship at the USA Collegiate National
Championship in Las Vegas on Feb. 6.
The dance team came away with two awards, placing first in the hip-hop competition and taking third in the jazz routine.
Oregon took fourth place in the competition the previous year.
“This year we’ve created a name for ourselves,” team co-captain Whitney Schiller said. The team edged Washington State to win the hip-hop competition, but was beaten out by Brigham Young and USC in jazz, both of which have been perennially successful in the competition.
Oregon averaged a score of 93 in its two hip-hop routines and averaged 91 in jazz.
“The judges liked our (hip-hop) dances more than anybody else’s is because we move into a lot of different formations,” Schiller said.
Schiller also noted that the team dances to about seven interchangeable hip-hop tracks that are all mixed together to make the music nearly unrecognizable.
“We don’t (dance to) mainstream music, we do something that you probably won’t hear on the radio,” Schiller said. “Which is very important to us because we always try to stay away from the popular music that everybody else is going to do.”
Oregon’s accomplishment is considered even more remarkable because of the team’s stature as a club team that has a budget of $1,000. Many of the other teams at nationals were teams that are part of their school’s athletic department, thus having substantially larger budgets to help finance the team.
“Our team did a great deal of fundraising to participate in this event,” coach Karl Mundt said in a University press release. “We are so grateful for all that club sports and the executive committee have done for us, but ultimately the team has to come up with the majority of its funding.”
The fundraising efforts include sponsorship from local businesses, holding instructional dance camps during the summer and being paid to perform at Oregon’s home football games.
The team practices three times a week for two hours, which involves non-stop dancing. They also do alternative workout methods that involve cardiovascular fitness.
“Since we don’t have (our own) facilities to use, we have to go work out at six in the morning,” Schiller said.
Schiller hopes that their performance at Nationals is enough to convince the athletic department that they deserve to be a sanctioned University team.
“We’d love for that to happen,” Schiller said. “The program’s been around for eight years and we’ve been hoping and praying every year that they would recognize us, and I think this is quite a step up from what we’ve ever achieved before.”
Ducks dance to first national championship
Daily Emerald
February 12, 2006
The Oregon club dance team won the hip-hop division of the USA Collegiate National Championship in Las Vegas Feb. 6. The team was founded in 1998.
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