After nationals, our team takes a moment to rest, recharge and get ready for the new year. This year was especially busy as Jacinda headed straight from Nationals to Vegas for her sons' basketball tournament. After all of the summer traveling, our team had a few days to meet, chat and decide on the goals for our sister company, Dance-Twirl Minnesota as well as Baton Twirling Unlimited. Our conversations really focused in on "how can we help others grow this sport" and these conversations led us to our goals for this season.
First, how can we support teachers, coaches or directors? Whatever you want to call us - coach, teacher, director, baton twirlers come at a slight disadvantage in that you can't go to college and major in baton twirling. We all come to the "table" with knowledge that likely came from our teacher and we definitely bring our own unique personality and style for twirling. While some may see the lack of standardization as a detriment, it also is likely one of our biggest strengths because we have teachers with such diverse backgrounds. Where we lack is a consistent pathway for communicating all of these strengths across our industry. We definitely want to provide support however we can but we also want to create opportunities for sharing knowledge and information. Common conversations that we have heard at Nationals include how do you get a 6 year old to do that level of twirling? How do you grow your classes to the point that you have a waiting list of eager students? How do you coach students to perform under such intense, high pressure situations and perform flawlessly? How do you get your school district to support twirlers? Everyone agreed that these things are happening in the industry and those stories, that information is just not being shared so people try and fail, try and fail and some eventually give up. Let's share these tips and tricks so people see success!
Second, we want to support twirlers and their families. We want to continue to provide instructional videos for twirlers and coaches along with resources that encourage twirlers and engage them to continue on in this amazing sport. We're still working out the details here and will post updates throughout the year.
Third, we will continue to host events, such as competitions and camps. We hosted our very first camp, Windy City Twirling Camp in 2024 and we plan to host this camp again in 2025. We also are exploring options for a new and exciting type of event in 2025. Stay tuned as we sort out all of the details and what that event will look like!
Last thing, we are committed to doing is seeing more twirlers achieve high school and college twirling positions. Hearing the roar of the crowd as you take the field or the basketball court is a feeling that is just so hard to explain and so few twirlers make it that far. We want to help twirlers understand the process and prepare for college twirling. We are pretty excited about a couple of the cool things that we have planned!
For us to achieve these goals, we are going to implement an Advisory Board and we are looking for people in the twirling community to join us. We are seeking to have a diverse group of people involved in the twirling world join us to provide ideas and feedback on what is needed in the twirling world. If you are interested, please complete the form below:
Advisory Board Application