The Wake

Growing up, Beth Novak always loved to dance. When she first came to the University of Minnesota back in the autumn of 2004, she wanted to keep dancing. When she didn’t make the university’s prestigious Dance Team, she found that there were no options for a person in her position short of becoming a dance major. So she created one.

Now a senior in the Carlson School of Management, Novak has watched the dance team she and a pair of high school friends created grow and flourish over the past three years. What started out as a student organization consisting only of an informal dance clinic has now developed into Premier Dance Team (PDT), an established club team that competes against other regional dance squads.

In its first year, the program was simply a spring clinic where girls could show their skills and learn some choreography for fun. Yet, the idea was always to create a competitive team. So in the fall of 2005, the team held their first tryouts. Novak knew the team was serving a need on campus when over 100 people showed up for the first day of auditions.

Now, PDT has become something more than an option for girls who were unable to make it onto the U of M Dance Team. It is an opportunity for dancers to continue doing what they love without the pressure and tremendous time commitment associated with the Nationals team.

“Education’s very important to me and I wanted to make sure I had enough time to do my homework,” says Tara Ata, a junior in her second year on the team. She enjoys the team’s relatively light practice schedule, and adds that she likes the camaraderie among teammates, noting that the girls on the team are “like a second family.”

Dani Benson, a sophomore who will be taking over as a captain next year, says she expects the team to continue to grow. “We have more and more girls try out every year,” she says, estimating that the number of people at tryouts this year increased by 30 to 40 percent from last year.

That growth will help bring PDT toward the goal that Novak envisioned when she started the team.

“I think the level I would want it to reach is where we are closely ranked among all of the teams that have professional coaches and university funding,” she says.

With a group of enthusiastic, motivated and – above all – young members (all but two of the team’s current 18 members are underclassmen), there’s no reason that goal can’t be reached.