The perfect basketball dance can be so elusive. As basketball teams begin their practices on the court, many basketball cheerleading programs are beginning their practices on the mats! So how can you and your squad develop the perfect dance for the sideline performance at the basketball game? There are several key elements which you can look for to help create the perfect dance.
Finding a Hot Cheer Track
One of them is to have amazing music. Having the track that was hot last year as your dance for this year is never a good look. You want to have the music which is the most recent epic dance track that you can imagine. And while it’s easy to look at top 40 hits to see what is going to be the song for your squad, it is often better to look to chilling dance professionals like your friends at CheerleadingMix.com to find that scorching track. The music producers at CheerleadingMix.com, like Cheer Music Pro (aka Patrick Avard), are the same ones who create the amazing music that you hear at the cheerleading world championships every single year! Those same unique tracks are available with CheerleadingMix.com‘s effortless user interface, for a fraction of the cost of what you see for those worlds mixes.
Formations and Levels
When you are looking at choreography, one of the most important moments is the use of the floor. All too often dance teams get trapped in one formation, and stay in that formation focusing on the individual movements rather than looking at their formations from a broader perspective. As you and your squad start to put together your sweet dance moves, think about how you can make full use of the basketball court. Multi-level formations moving in different directions help draw the eye in a way which a static formation often does not. Incorporating something as easy as a level change can often significantly change the way the audience perceives the dance performance.
Doing it Together
Synchronization is difficult. It takes hundreds of hours of practice for dance teams to get a dance routine that looks like everyone is moving as a single individual, reflected in mirrors. Luckily, there are many tricks which you can use to make it so that synchronization is not necessary. One of them is to use ripples, or contagions. Using a peel-off ripple or contagion can help let each person on your squad put their own unique spin on the dance moves, but because you are peeling off the formation everyone will do it in a way which seems more synchronized. It’s an illusion of the eye: seeing people move like that in different directions at the same time makes it hard to tell if someone’s individual movement is off. Think about trying to use a contagion next time you and your squad are putting together your dance routine.
There are real challenges to entertaining the crowd during timeouts and halftime at a basketball game. Maybe not appreciate the hours of work that it takes to put together a cohesive dance which can tell a story and keep everyone on the edge of their seats. However, if you and your squad can take into account things like having that epic cheer track and having complex multi-level choreography, then you can entertain your crowd as well as the best slam dunking player on your team!