Students in the News

Second and third graders learn how to do a kick line with sophomore Kelsey Barnes and juniors Ginny Harper and Eleni Watts at the Meadowdale High School Dance Team dance clinic on Jan. 29.

Molly Todd is more into sports than dancing, but when her sister told her about Meadowdale High School’s dance clinic, she figured she’d give it a try.

“My sister is on the dance team, and she’s a big dancer because my mom likes to dance, but I guess it went to her,” the sixth grader said.  “I’m not really a dance person; I like to play soccer.”

Even so, Todd and three of her friends from Seaview Elementary had fun dancing at the clinic last week with Meadowdale’s dance team.

The dance team held its seventh annual dance clinic at Meadowdale on Jan. 29 for girls interested in learning how to dance.

About 55 girls in kindergarten through sixth grade from Beverly, Lynndale, Maplewood, Seaview, Edmonds and Meadowdale elementaries and Madrona K-8 attended the clinic.

“We generally invite girls from elementary schools that feed into Meadowdale High School, because they’ll eventually become students at Meadowdale, and if they follow through with this, we might end up with some of those girls on the dance team,” said coach Susan Todd, Molly’s mom.

For $40, the girls spent a day learning how to do leaps, jumps, turns and kicks and a dance routine.  They also received a T-shirt, decorative hair band, and souvenir photo of the dance team.

“We had a lot of returning girls,” Susan Todd said.  “From what the parents told me, a lot of the girls couldn’t wait to come back.  Some of the girls, who had been at the clinic last year, showed up wearing last year’s clinic T-shirt.  It was really cute.”

For the routines, the dance team split the girls up into groups – kindergarteners and first graders, second and third graders, and fourth through sixth graders – and taught them dance routines they’d choreographed to popular Radio Disney songs.

Team captain Maddy Grund, a senior, helped three of her teammates choreograph a routine for the kindergarteners and first graders to the song “Party in the U.S.A.” by Miley Cyrus.

“The little kids had a lot of fun,” Grund said.  “They wanted to be dancing all day long – even on our breaks.  On our lunch break, they would be trying to practice and they wanted to dance with us even more.”

The girls then performed their dance routines for their parents.  The dance team also performed the dance they’ve choreographed for competitions for the girls and their parents at the clinic.

Quinn Cassidy, a sixth grader at Seaview and one of Molly’s friends, liked the dance routine she and the fourth through sixth graders performed to the song “La La Land” by Demi Lovato.

“When I performed, it was a lot of fun because I was there with my friends,” she said.  “I have stage fright, but it was really fun anyway.” 

The Jan. 29 clinic was Cassidy’s second Meadowdale dance clinic.  She said she is thinking of trying out for the dance team when she gets to Meadowdale.

The dance team also invited the girls to the Meadowdale basketball game that night to perform their dance routines during halftime.

“Performing at halftime I think was the funnest part because I was really nervous and I didn’t want to do it,” Molly Todd said, “but then one of the captains said, ‘Oh, please do it – you won’t regret it’ and my friends and I were like, ‘OK, we’re going to do it.’ 

“I messed up on some parts, and it was kind of funny, but it was really fun and we didn’t regret it after. I felt good after I did it.”

The clinic is a fundraiser for the dance team’s trip to Yakima for the state competition in March, including funds for the team’s transportation, hotel and costumes.  Todd has yet to tally her receipts, but she guesses they raised about $1,500 with the clinic.

The clinic helps raise funds and awareness for Meadowdale’s dance team, but it’s also a good way for the 12 dancers on the team to bond, Grund said.

“It gives us a chance to get to know each other,” she said.  “And I like watching my girls with them.  It’s really fun to see them take what they’ve learned so far and teach it to little kids.  They seem to really enjoy it.”