The University of Minnesota Dance Team has been all over students’ Tiktok pages recently. While most BigTen colleges put an emphasis on football and basketball, the University of Minnesota has some different priorities with a focus on dance and hockey.
Recently, the University of Minnesota Dance Team has done exceptionally well at the College Dance Team National Championships. In January 2024, the team took home their second-straight national title in Florida after winning the national title for both Division 1A Jazz and Division 1A Pom in January 2023.
This year’s Gopher Dance Team won first place in the Division 1A Pom, and while their performance for Division 1A Pom was extravagant, social media has drawn its eyes to their second-place performance in the Division 1A Jazz category.
The song “Dream On” was selected for their performance this year. Despite this song not having much meaning to most people other than being a 1973 Aerosmith song, it had some deeper roots and meaning to the University of Minnesota Dance Team. “Dream On” also happens to be the same song that the Gophers used when they won their first back-to-back national championship twenty years ago for the 2004 College Dance Team National Championship in Georgia.
The Gopher’s coach, Amanda Gaines, stated “that song had a lot of meaning to our program, and to the legacy of our team. And so, we were really excited to get to pay tribute to that with a self-choreographed routine.”
Since 2004, the team has continued to really make the University of Minnesota a “dance school.” Since then, the University of Minnesota has won ten national titles in Pom and twenty-two national titles overall.
Gaines also said that this is the most attention that the dance team has ever received. A lot of this is attributed to the growth of social media that enables many of the people who appreciate and occasionally cheer for the University of Minnesota Dance Team to really be invested and add their own commentary.
“The fact that we’re kind of gaining fans in real time, not just for Minnesota, but for collegiate dance team in general, I think it’s just really cool,” the Gopher Dance Team coach said.
Although the dance team has so much hype centered around Tiktok, many members of the dance team were strongly encouraged to delete the app from their phones and stay off of social media before the competition. The coaches and teammates wanted to avoid the mental burdens and distractions that come with competition and staying off of social media was a good way to get in the zone.
Even though a lot of the team chose to stay off of social media, many of them heard that videos of their jazz routine were going viral. Commentary about the team’s performance ranged all the way from college kids all the way up to Tim Walz’s account. The Minnesota governor shared a video on X, formerly Twitter, of their performance with the caption “This is bada**.”
I myself do not come from a dance background at all, but watching the synchronization of the team with each of the turns and axels in sequence is completely mesmerizing and incredible.
For those who haven’t stumbled across enough clips to watch on repeat and looking to see the full University of Minnesota Division 1A Jazz routine, you can watch the dance team and enthusiastic crowd at this link: 2024 University of Minnesota Jazz Routine.
