Shan Stavropoulos

Millard West’s First Year At UDA Nationals:  “We did not get out of semifinals.  And from that moment on while everybody that Sunday morning, when finals started for UDA, this is how I knew this is what I wanted to do. And really focus on. Everybody went to the parks, all the girls on the team and the parents went to the park.  I’m here for a purpose and I’m fierce and I’m competitive. So I went, I walked myself to a store and bought a notebook. I caught the bus. I sat in the same seat from 8:05 AM till midnight.  And I still have that notebook to this day.  And I took notes on every team and what they did and the top teams and what I thought they did to get there.  And after that moment, there was never another year that we were not in the top 10.”

Planning and preparing for a dance team year:  “You have to be able to change because the kids change.  Every year is different and totally different from when I first started, because when I first started, we would take a home routine to camp. We would then work on a pom routine just for fun. Then we would do a pom routine that we would compete just in the November competitions that we wouldn’t take to nationals. We would do a fun jazz. And then in November I would start teaching the real pom that we would take to nationals. Then as a treat, they would get to start to learn hip hop in December. That’s not like that anymore. These kids now need to learn the routines in August and September or they freak out. You have to change your year every year, but you keep those things at work.   We do a workweek the first week of August and it’s every single day, Monday through Friday, all day. And we work on every single routine we’re going to do as a school team through the year.  You make it fun, you order in pizza, you do some fun bonding things, make the choreo fun. We take things we learned from camp. We break them all up into groups and we have them each work on their own routines and it’s two routines per day for five days, then you have 10 routines that you can use for games and as a warm up for national routines practices.”

I love Shan’s formula for success, because I think a lot of times coaches put a lot of pressure on themselves.  “It’s chemistry and consistency.  You just knew those years that it was going to be an awesome year because the chemistry of the kids, the parents and everything that it encompasses like there. And I’m not saying everything goes smoothly. Those years are never the years that I did good. It was always some sort of rough start or something happened. Obviously you’re dealing with a whole bunch of parents and a whole bunch of teenage girls all year long. If we only did this for three months, nobody would ever quit because you would just love it so much. You know, it’d be such a highlight of your life, which it is still, but it’s still a long season, 360 days out of 365, honestly. And so those years that I, that I still think about, are just where those kids, they just had it and they just got it. And you know it right from the beginning. I mean, they’re in it. Things don’t bother them. They’re not so emotional. There’s just those kids. One year, the year that we almost won nationals again,  in 2011, I had eight new girls out of 14. And at the beginning of year I’m like, this is going to be rebuilding year. The chemistry of that team was amazing. And the leaders of that year, if I could bottle them the year we won nationals and that year I would.  You cannot do it alone.”