Nodaway Valley trio participates in All-Iowa Honor Dance Team

For the first time since 2021, when Morgan Brown participated, Nodaway Valley had representation in this year’s All-Iowa Dance Team during the girls state basketball tournament, held lats week in Des Moines. But unlike that year, the Wolverines had three dancers performing in the prestigous group.

Junior Chloe Rardin and sophomore Addison Brewer were part of pregame routines on Friday and Saturday and freshman Aleyah Pilgreen performed as part of a hip hop and pom team during halftime of a game.

“I don’t remember the last time we had three dance at All-Iowa. The girls went back in August to try out. There were about 500 girls who tried out and they only selected about 250, so you had about a 50/50 shot of making it,” Nodaway Valley dance coach Sami Britten said.

That audition process to make the All-Iowa Dance Team was very rigorous. Dancers had a short amount of time on the day of auditions to learn a routine that would showcase their ability dancing to pom, hip hop and kick styles.

“We all were in groups and performed it for the committee who selected [who makes it],” Rardin said. “We only had about four hours to learn it, and that was a little scary. It was intimidating and there were a lot of good dancers from the state of Iowa.”

The pregame routine dancers performed was set to the Neil Diamond song “America.” It included several different aspects, including flags and hoopla. Each dancer held one state flag for part of the performance and stayed on the court during the performance of the national anthem that followed.

“Friday night was probably the scariest because that was the biggest game. We got our routine a couple weeks before we went to perform and had Thursday and Friday to learn it [with the entire group],” Brewer said. The entire group practiced it for hours upon hours in order to perfect it.

Pilgreen explained that her favorite part on the halftime performance end of the experience was making new friends.

“It was cool to have teammates in the pregame to see what that was like. The halftime had two pom sections with everyone who made it, a small hip hop section that I was in, a kick section, then a smaller pom section that I was also in,” Pilgreen said. “Dancing with that many girls, the practices were kind of hard to coordinate. Seeing all that come together was pretty rewarding.”

Britten hopes that having three dancers who experienced this will only increase interest in tryouts for the All-Iowa Dance Team in the future.

“A big piece of it is that a lot of people probably didn’t really know what All-Iowa was until these three were a part of it,” Britten said. “I remember watching All-Iowa when I was little because my cousins did it, but I don’t think a lot of people on the dance team knew what it was. When I offered it for students to audition, some probably didn’t know what it was. You can take six people to audition, so I am hoping to convince a few other girls to go with us next year.”