Now that you know all about my enthusiasm and respect for fall halftime season, here’s the backstory on the 8CA Top 25.
How it started
During the pandemic I focused on clarifying the 8CA mission. As we emerged back into normal life, I wanted to put those ideals into action. I knew that fall halftime season had unfairly slid downward in visibility and prestige, so I wanted to give those teams more recognition.
Why not a ranking poll, like other sports? Polls are essential parts of college football and basketball. Newspapers do the same for high school sports, usually ranked by the writer herself.
It was a simple idea with the potential for a lot of fun (and work). But being Illinois dance, there would be a bevy of asterisks and question marks on the idea sheet. For example, it’s the non-sport part of the dance year (and all the weird stuff that our weird system engenders). How could we possibly view every halftime routine out there on every weekend? If we were trying to go totally oppo the winter vibe, what would the criteria be for assessing a routine?
Well, whatever. Sometimes you do actually need to stop and get everything perfect before sending it out into the world. Other times, you’re giving up too many positives if you wait too long to launch an idea. So in its imperfect state, the 8CA Top 20 debuted on August 30, 2022 covering weekend 1 of that football season.
Process and principles
I probably should’ve immediately made an appointment with my optometrist and orthopedic doc, because there would be a lot of scrolling / hunting, bookmarking, watching, and note-taking. Whether from the feed, a DM or email, or the hashtag notification, the basic process started with gathering all the dances from a weekend.
I wasn’t sure how much I’d find. Not everyone posts (or does so in time), for any number of reasons. And of the hundreds of halftime teams around Illinois, just a fraction would be in action, and on video, and easily findable. So for that first fall I stuck to a list of twenty varsity teams.
One of the principles in the 8CA mission statement is to promote the ideal of a single Illinois dance community. So it was important that this poll be STATEWIDE (high school sports rankings often don’t do that, sticking to a newspaper’s region).
Back then it was an actual poll. Like college sports, I envisioned a coaches’ poll where a panel would vote on their rankings of the dances. Usually college football and hoops also have a “writer’s poll” voted on by sports writers. The 8CA version, alongside the coaches’ poll, would be the 8CA staff poll of our instructors, reporters, and myself.
Each week I came up with a new Google form for voting, and I asked each voter to watch the routines and rank their top 20. In theory, about half of Illinois’ fall dance teams would be in action on any given Friday night, but only a percentage of them posted or were ok with participating. So I had to revise the ballot each week, or it would’ve been confusing to the voters and could also skew their perception of the field that weekend, possibly affecting how they rank routines. Not gonna lie: it was tedious work.
This was obviously a serious time commitment for teachers and coaches. On the 8CA side, staffers themselves were busy with college or teaching. On my end, running and debugging the spreadsheets each week was at the same level of fun as fixing a printer or cleaning the microwave.
A voter’s number 20 team would get 1 point, and her top team got the full haul of 20 points. I just added up the points from all the ballots to create the Coaches and then the 8CA Staff’s Top 20. The rankings would not be cumulative, like how college polls trace a team’s ups and downs throughout the season (I want to try that for winter someday). We strictly focused on that weekend’s dances.
Chaotic and casual
I tried to allay all the critiques and hesitations with this overarching theme: this whole thing was casual and fun. No rubrics and scores. No need for tricks and precision, but those obviously do add to the overall effect and audience engagement. This was about the traditional Friday night experience for both the teams and the fans. And as I pointed out last week, these dances are often the gateway for people to start to understand the dance team and poms concept.
I had to take into account other ways the weekly field could shrink. Weather played a big role: dances scaled back or cancelled, sometimes along with the games themselves. A few dancers pointed out how it wasn’t fair for a kids camp routine to go up against a normal dance, so I decided to exclude those “novelty” routines with campers, parents, non-dancers (sports teams and parents, usually) unless there was a significant portion of the routine with just the dance team.
If a team had multiple performances during that week, I’d use their strongest one as their entry. If I missed a dance the week before it would get mixed in with this week’s batch. Once in a great while I’d see two schools’ pom teams collab on a dance, and so I counted that as a single entry (the classic mashup was Minooka and Morris, sometimes the Valleys–Neuqua, Waubonsie, Metea–and Glenbard East and South).
All of those imperfections and compromises fit with the tone of the 8CA Top 20: laid back, flexible, casual, and festive…the total opposite of winter’s rigidity and tension.
Divisions, tiers, and points
I didn’t want to straight-up use the IHSA classes; I thought it’d be cool for all teams to be in one field for the main Top 20. Since I was strictly going on the “eye test of entertainment,” it was totally possible (and hoped for) that sometimes non-elite teams would work their way high on the list. To get even more teams spotlighted, I came up with the 2-division system starting in the Fall 2024, besides the “combined” Top 25 list (20 was no longer enough!). Going full-Illini, there was the Blue Division list (teams at IHSA state or top 3 in a category at IDTA state) and Orange (everyone else). It got even spicier when I expanded Blue to included the top 8 teams at each IHSA sectional from the previous winter.
This didn’t last, but it’s worth mentioning. For a couple seasons I had the lower end of the field in a tier, just to soften any disappointments, though most people said this took away some of the fun. Also not even getting off the ground was a proposed point system where I’d keep a running count of each team’s rank points throughout the fall. I tested this before it got to the IRL stage, and mainly learned that it was Spreadsheet Hell. The schedule differences among teams (and all the “novelty” routines that I left out) just made it too messy to track cumulative points throughout fall. Side note: I’m hoping to fix this so we can have an 8CA cumulative winter points system.
Hopes and effects
Eventually I had to give up having a weekly voting panel — it was too much for coaches and college kids. So it’s not technically a poll at this point (maybe again in the future?), but the sports world likes calling any top list of teams a “poll,” so the name stays. And running 8CA and its music editing side of the business meant some pretty late Top 25 posts.
Imperfections aside, I’m grateful and happy with what the 8CA Top 25 has become. It’s an affirmation of dance team being a sport, the kind you’d find next to the other sports with ranking polls in the newspaper. Even more rebellious, we did this for fall halftime season, when it’s technically not a sport. Of course, it IS a sport in fall. Since the 1990s I’ve seen enough ice bags, crutches, heart, tears, and joy at fall practices and game performances to confirm this. I’ve heard the coaches’ encouragements and warnings, the teammates’ support and critiques, and the crowds’ enthusiastic approval.
I wanted more teams to get the attention their hard work and talent deserve, and I wanted to restore some luster to the concept of a halftime poms team and their performances and role on Friday nights. I think we succeeded in both of those goals. Any team from anywhere in Illinois has a shot at their name appearing on the combined or division Top 25s. Any dancer who realistically won’t be on the team in winter has a chance at statewide recognition.
For such a segmented, sometimes elitist, sometimes too-cagey dance community, that’s a huge win. I think we swung the pendulum away from the idea that winter is all that matters, the notion that programs are defined only by those trophies. When a non-postseason team gets a high spot on the list, they stick out and glow for the whole state to see. For styles of dance like pom and hip hop, and even traditional jazz, gameday flavors, and kick sections — all the categories that struggle in IHSA competition — here was the chance to restore a sense of balance and stylistic range, all in front of fans, potential fans, and stakeholders.
Football playoffs start tonight, so we’ll start to see empty halftimes, or maybe some recycled routines. Everyone has their mind on Monday’s competition season tryouts. No matter how a team’s winter turns out, they had a fall, and maybe at some point they landed on the 8CA Fall Halftime Top 25 to prove it.
