Steppin' Stone for Athletes

Dance Class Improves Their Footwork, Agility

Senior basketball and football player Taronce Stowes, left, and senior basketball player Erika Jones rehearse for their recital. (Toni L. Sandys - The Washington Post)

Other students who waited backstage bit their fingernails and chattered nervously, but Tim Dash looked just like he always did: confident and unbothered, almost apathetic.

The quarterback of the Glen Burnie High School football team, Dash had earned school-wide popularity for his unflappability. He reacted to jeers and cheers with similar indifference. During some Friday night football games, he suffered a half-dozen crushing hits from linebackers, only to walk through school halls Monday morning like he'd never been touched.

For almost four years, Dash had built his high school reputation on a simple philosophy: stay cool. He reminded himself of that mantra now, as he readied to dance to Aerosmith and Barry Manilow in a school production. Then the curtains slid open. The music started. A spotlight hit his face.

The quarterback felt, he said later, like throwing up.

"I've never been that nervous in my life," said Dash, who performed flawlessly nonetheless. "I couldn't help it. The crowd just got to me. Football never gave me anything like that."

It's a sensation that has practically become a rite of passage for athletes at Glen Burnie, a public high school in Anne Arundel County that has fused team sports and dance with unparalleled success. Each year, about 350 Glen Burnie students take "Dance for the Athlete," a class that teaches swing, Latin, hip-hop, ballroom and Broadway dancing before culminating each semester in a performance in front of 1,400 in the school auditorium. It is Glen Burnie's most popular class, but it's offered at only a few other schools -- and nowhere outside out of Anne Arundel.

Dance and boys' sports -- two activities once diametrically opposed in high schools -- are symbiotic at Glen Burnie. Athlete participation fuels the state's largest dance program; dance classes improve athletes' footwork, agility, balance and composure under pressure.

But Glen Burnie's program also is the latest manifestation of a shifting perception among male athletes at the school. Dancing, once taboo for macho sports stars, has become cool.

"These big jocks are figuring out that dancing is no girly activity," said Dianne Rosso, dance director at Glen Burnie. "This class makes even our best players better athletes and more confident performers. They can't get enough of it."

It's a popularity Rosso hardly anticipated when she wrote the curriculum for the first Dance for the Athlete class about a decade ago. Back then, Rosso said, dancing was so stigmatized that no boy signed up for her first class. Girls in the class combed schools halls, desperate to recruit male dance partners. Even then, they only found four.

"But those guys loved it," said Rosso, "and they spread the word to everyone."

What resulted at Glen Burnie became a demonstration in exponential mathematics. Eight boys signed up the next year. Then 20. Then almost 50. This year, Glen Burnie will offer 14 sections of Dance for the Athlete, each filled with about 25 students.