Team Feature: Lemont

When your team is 85% upperclassmen, dancing shoeless isn’t a problem.

 

by Norm Ramil, 8 Count Audio chief.music.officer & dance.fan

This isn’t your typical Chicago suburb. Lemont’s borders spill over into three counties (DuPage, Cook, and Will), refusing to be contained in convenient lines. The wide Des Plaines River runs next to downtown, and then the ground slopes radically upward south of the business district. This makes for scenic views, hilly and narrow streets, almost as if you’re no longer in Chicagoland.

Because of downtown Lemont’s hilly landscape, their high school has one of the most distinctive campuses in the area. Space and hilliness are challenges, so the school’s buildings have a vertical feel. Parking? A couple lots here and there, but if you don’t have luck snagging a spot, it’s cool, just head to the parking deck. I drove by a tennis court that seemed to come out of nowhere, set against a picturesque landscape, and then on what seemed like a back alley before I stumbled on the interesting options for parking my car.

It’s a warm and cloudy September afternoon, and I find Lemont’s Varsity Dance Team sweating through a conditioning session in their practice space, on the top floor of their performing arts building. We’re in a sizable training room, though cardio machines seem to occupy more than half of it. The dancers have their own mirrored space that’s a little too compact for this team of 20. On the other hand, it’s pretty cool that this dance team is in a cardio room in an arts building—all totally appropriate for our unique sport.

“We usually do a lot of group work up here because of the limited space,” explains Varsity Coach Jordan Fandrey, and it’s easy for me to why they sometimes break into groups when cleaning routines. But at the moment, all of Varsity covers every square foot of the slightly rubbery floor as they do a conditioning and stretching routine. Coach Fandrey is usually up front doing conditioning alongside her dancers, a regimen scheduled once or twice a week. Cardio, on the other hand, is an every day thing, either on the nearby stationary bikes or on the track outside. The grippy floor (meant to serve all athletic teams rather than dancers, specifically) makes it hard to do turns, so the Lemont dancers don’t even wear jazz shoes unless they get the fieldhouse on Saturdays. Instead, this elite jazz team has socks on.

Lemont Varsity Dance Team is led by three captains. Actually, there’s no shortage of leaders—this year’s roster has 10 seniors, which should make for a pretty lengthy slideshow at the team banquet. Counting the seven juniors, Lemont is 85% upperclassmen! (Put away the calculators—I’ll just tell you that they’ve got two sophomores and a freshman for a total of 20). And it’s not like this is a sudden influx of veterans—six seniors graduated in May, and while that usually spells trouble for some teams, these 10 seniors have it all covered. A total of 13 are back from last year’s team.

JV has 13 on its roster, mostly freshmen. “They’re a very talented incoming group,” Fandrey tells me, the excitement of what they might accomplish in the next few years easy to read on her face. Coach Fandrey used to lead both varsity and JV, and that combined with the smallish practice space set up the alternate-days practice schedule for both levels. Now Coach Chelsea Freeman oversees Lemont’s JV dancers.

The team has an egalitarian streak (btw, I’m trying to sneak in an SAT vocab word in every post…sorry…thank me later…). Despite being so senior-heavy, each team member gets a chance to lead conditioning. This means bringing your own set of movements and music, effectively demonstrating it and guiding your teammates. Coach Fandrey’s quite proud of how deep her team is: “Last year, we had alternates but didn’t really need to—everyone was really good by that point.”

Bridging the gap between this conditioning sesh and working on routines is a warm-up routine—a team creation that they do each day. It’s a clever mashup of different dance styles, conditioning, and strengthening.

Contemporary jazz is definitely Lemont’s specialty, though Varsity Coach Jordan Fandrey tells me that she thinks her team would be good at pom. Most of this team devotes time to studio classes, and it definitely shows in what they’ve put on the floor for the past several seasons. But it wasn’t always like that, according to their coach, now in her 4th year. “Many of the seniors that I started out with had no dance training,” she recalls. That’s all turned around now. Their shared technical skills are so deep that everyone on the team plays a part in choreographing game dances.

Despite being known for contemporary dance, Lemont is all pom for football season. Today they’re focused on the homecoming routine. They’re still learning parts of the dance, and Coach Fandrey jokes with me that I’m lucky to witness this “because it’s the extent of our kick stuff—the girls aren’t fans.” She says she’s fortunate because her captains are exceptional teachers. “These girls are concise in teaching, so the team picks up on it fast, and then they can spend more time on cleaning,” Fandrey explains. This kind of efficiency serves them well, since they’ve got that extra challenge of limited space, which makes formations and transitions a little dicey. I find myself standing on a step fitness thingie just to give the back row of the formation enough room to do their thing.

Lemont’s dance program has come a long way since Jordan Fandrey’s early days as coach, and even further since her years dancing on this team. “Things are really different from my days in high school. Conditioning and technique are at much higher levels,” observes Fandrey. Hand-in-hand with that higher level is their coach’s choreography skills, which she skillfully puts to use for competition season.

The Class of 2010 alum—a member of Lemont Dance when they competed in IDTA and TDI—learned a lot about what she would one day want in her own dance team. She coached Lemont to a 23rd at IHSA state in 2014, and then guided the program through the emotions of missing state by .07 in 2015. She next oversaw the team’s rise to its best IHSA finish: 15th last January. Lemont Dance took home a 4th at TDI’s 2012 State Championship in the 2A open-dance category. Well before Fandrey’s time, the 1995-96 poms team earned a 3rd at IDTA state in the old “Novelty” category, class AA.

A lot of talent comes up through the feeder and Catholic schools in Lemont. Five of these girls can do aerials, a fitting skill for a high school known as a cheer powerhouse. This year’s dance team is lucky to have several gymnasts, quite an achievement for a school so into cheer, Coach Fandrey tells me. Making the team involves the usual assortment of dance skills you’d expect on higher-level dance teams. For varsity, the dancers needed a triple and switch leap, and for JV, a double.

Once the team is put together, the highlight of their summer is UDA camp in Wheaton, where they mingled and made dance friends with teams like Huntley. The Lemont Dance Team also performed at a Chicago Bandits game (our local pro softball team). The girls also put in the work of three non-mandatory summer practices each week.

Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays are when you’ll find this team in practice mode. Throw in Fridays during competition season, too. It’s a pretty demanding schedule, especially when you factor in the business of being students. “Academics are a big deal here at Lemont, and when I was in high school, I also set a high standard for myself,” Coach Fandrey reveals. Saturdays are their best opportunity for the fieldhouse, where their formations can really take advantage of the space. Sure, they could wait around and have evening practices when the fieldhouse might be open, but these talented dancers also have jobs, dance classes, and homework.

The girls didn’t really start crafting football dances until late in the summer (their home opener routine was a dance from camp set to different music, so this eased the workload just a bit). The team got to perform on the Millikin football field early in the fall, a neutral site for a Lemont football game against a team from St. Louis. Basketball season is when this dance team showcases its competition dances at halftime, since they’re in such an intense jazz mindset at that time of year.

I’m a firm believer in the advantage of having some kind of music background when it comes to teaching or coaching dance. But Coach Fandrey’s musical skills set is a little outside the box for dance: she’s an accomplished trumpet player. Trumpeters are used to having the lead and standing out. I can’t help but assume that she has no problems getting her team to do what she envisions it can do, loudly and clearly, brass-like. Musicality is one of Lemont’s strengths according to their coach. “Many of the girls have a vocal or band background, so they pick up on the details of musicality quickly,” boasts the musician-coach.

Fandrey has another valuable skill. All of that trumpeting in her youth equated to lots of time on the field as part of the marching band. It’s one of those rare activities that combines movement and musicality. She even helps out teaching Lemont’s marching band on the football field, a task she literally runs to as soon as this practice finishes up.

But before you go and schedule Fandrey for a one-woman halftime show, be advised that she’s kind of busy. Before her dance team role after school, her workday is several miles west at Neuqua Valley, where she’s just started as a dance teacher. So it’s possible that this class 2A coach plays a role in cultivating the formidable dance talent at 3A Neuqua. And for good measure, I’ll add that she recently student-taught dance at Sandburg, another high-profile dance program.

Younger coaches face their own unique set of advantages and disadvantages, but it always helps to have a reliable, enthusiastic set of dance parents. Coach Fandrey tells me she’s thankful that the girls’ parents have a lot of trust in her, and she leans on them for support, as well. With the moms and dads handling those pesky travel and food details (along with fundraisers, gifts for the girls, that kind of thing), Fandrey is free to focus on her dancers and their routines.

“We do lots of fundraising, and the girls are good at it!” Fandrey says cheerfully. It’s an essential skill especially since the team qualified for nationals at camp over the summer. Besides using their financial and promotional skills, the Lemont Dance Team likes to make each other laugh. Coach Fandrey points out that her team is full of “goofballs” (before I arrived at practice, one girl asked if she could skip conditioning… because of the 8 Count Audio visit…not a valid reason, I guess, but I do support the effort).

The girls finish up today’s practice with a couple runs of their homecoming dance, with music, and I perch myself on top of a stack of hopefully clean gym mats in a front corner for pictures. For the next couple minutes, this team of dancers—academically sharp and musicality-minded—puts aside their contemporary jazz leanings and instead does the pom and kick thing, all for the benefit of the home crowd. And in a few months, they’ll leave their hilly headquarters, take the floor at a competition (with shoes on), and unleash their technical talents on a lucky audience.