SCSU Dance Team Members Reflect on 7th National Championship

ST. CLOUD (WJON News) -- Earlier this month the St. Cloud State University Dance Team won its 7th national championship. They took first place in the Open Game Day category at the UDA Nationals in Orlando.

Four members of the team stopped by the WJON studio on Tuesday.

Hannah Vlog is a junior biomedical science major from Zimmerman. She says she came to St. Cloud for both the classes and the dance program.

Dance definitely sealed the deal for me, but I do enjoy the university here as well with classes.

Another junior on the team is Autumn Jotblad a Spanish and Marketing student from Forest Lake. She says she knew in high school that SCSU is where she wanted to be.

For the dance, they had such a good history with a great record of winning titles and a team culture and atmosphere.  That's what brought me to the dance team.  But also the school as well, they have a great business school here.

Katie Cramer is a Bio-Medical Science student from Elk River. She says they are a young squad.

We've actually got a really big rookie class this year, so half of our team are rookies, but usually, four people is an average class.

The SCSU dance team is made up of 19 total members.

Reese Amundsen is from Fargo and is studying marketing. He says he came to SCSU strictly for dance, and he started looking for a program interested in having a male on the team when he was in high school.

I started reaching out to colleges during my sophomore year in high school and started asking if they wanted a boy on the team.  At that time, that was not something you saw, so I had to ask around to see which teams were even willing to have a boy on the team.

There are no scholarships for dance team members and they actually have to pay to be on the team.

They practiced a total of 160 hours in December and January to prepare for the national competition.

St. Cloud State won four consecutive UDA Open Game Day national titles from 2020-2023. They also won national titles in Open Pom in 2016 and 2021. This year the squad finished fourth nationally in both Open Pom and Open Jazz.

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In Open Pom and Open Jazz, four of the top five schools were all from Minnesota.  Minnesota State-Mankato won both categories.  They say Minnesota is known for dance and the dance studios are top-class.  Students from across the country want to come to compete for Minnesota schools.

They say dance is more relevant now they ever because of social media.  They can post their performances online and gain a following that way.

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