Poms Squad in Pursuit of Watkins Mill Pride

A boom box blares from the corner of Watkins Mill High School’s main gym as coach Beth Jordan urges her dancers through practice earlier this week, counting out cadences and scrutinizing every step, swivel and kick until the two-hour session culminates with one last run-through of their routine, a flurry of jumps and poms and broad, beaming smiles.

"Fight through being tired!" she commands toward the end of the six-minute routine. "You're not tired!"

Everything has to be perfect.

For six minutes tomorrow at Richard Montgomery High School, they’ll be facing more than the judges and hundreds of spectators at the county’s Poms championship. They’ll also be fighting against other schools' more accomplished and resource-rich Poms programs, and the abiding stigma that Watkins Mill doesn’t belong alongside the county’s best.

Coming off of last year’s string of last-place finishes, this year’s team of 11 girls has been honing their act at home-game halftimes since August, working to erase the memory of last year’s championship, where judges soured to Watkins Mill’s risqué routine—a miscalculation that Jordan is determined to atone for tomorrow.

The strides have been taking hold. Watkins Mill came in third out of four teams, then fourth out of sixth teams, at a pair of competitions last month, scoring big wins over Rockville and Walter Johnson.

But for Jordan, it’s about more than better performances on the floor.

“It goes way beyond Poms,” she said. “You’re teaching them how to be young ladies. You’re teaching them how to be socially responsible. We’re talking about how to protect yourself as a woman and not slip into trouble with alcohol or drugs or boys. They’re going to go off to college and I want them to be strong and confident, healthy and happy.”

It has been a wholesale transformation since team co-captain Soraya Anderson’s freshman year, the dancers in disarray and the team in need of a new coach. With Jordan at the helm the following year, Watkins Mill scored a galvanizing runner-up finish at a mid-season competition—and setting in motion the team's total turnaround.

“She brought us back to life,” said Anderson, one of the team’s seven seniors. “Since then we’ve grown so much closer and we’ve gotten so much better.”

As squad captain for tomorrow’s performance, it’ll be up to Anderson to embody that spirit as she leads the team through its routine while being judged individually against the other schools’ captains. That pressure pales, she said, compared to the burden the team faces in combating misconceptions about Watkins Mill’s character, a constant and palpable feeling that no one expects them to do well.

“A lot of people don’t really know what goes on here. They believe that we’re all bad and that we don’t know how to act in front of other schools,” Anderson said. “It puts a chip on my shoulder, because I don’t want people to think that about us. We do have good sportsmanship and we do know how to act. I just think that they want to believe what they want to believe.”

With a keen focus and their faith in each other peaking, Anderson is certain their hard work in the weeks leading up tomorrow’s championship will pay off.

“We’ve made a lot of positive changes. When we’re all getting along, when we’re together and bonding, we do very well and we perform very well,” she said. “If we just maintain a positive attitude, it’ll look phenomenal, we’ll wow the judges.”

The team’s optimism is tempered by a daunting reality.  They regularly go up against squads twice their size, with expert choreography and a deeper dancing pedigree, while Watkins Mill’s squad is a mish-mash group of girls more likely to turn to YouTube and to each other for help.

“We don’t have anything here like other schools have, we just don’t have a system built up here,” Jordan said. “I’ve got four softball players, I have three basketball players, I have two cheerleaders and I have a couple girls who have never done anything like this at all. And you have to take those girls and turn them into dancers starting in August. It’s exhausting. You have to really love each other—which, fortunately, we do.”

So Jordan doesn’t envision a storybook upset where Watkins Mill beats even the very best—Walter Johnson, Richard Montgomery, Northwest—of the dozen schools in their division.

For now, she’s only envisioning her team’s elation and satisfaction of the bus ride home tomorrow, of the girls being able to bring back a small but significant measure of Watkins Mill pride.

“They deserve it, they’ve earned it,” she said. “It’ll make everything worth it, everything we’ve gone through—all the injuries and all the crying and all the missed parties and all the homework and all the things that got sacrificed—it makes it all worth it.”