Sports
Eastview Girls Dance to 3rd Place in State Jazz
The Lightning kept their state dance team streak alive with a third-place finish in the jazz division Friday.
This year's Eastview Lightning dancers didn’t want to be the ones to break the team's streak of placing at the state competition.
Thanks to a third-place finish in the jazz division Friday, they aren't.
Eastview finished third in the girls dance team state tournament held at the Target Center in Minneapolis on Friday.
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“We are so happy,” said an emotional Eastview captain Kate Harp as she held the dance team trophy long after the event had ended. “As a team this year we never thought we were going to get this far. We lost over half of our jazz team last year and we didn’t even think we were going to make it to state. We exceeded the expectation that we had for the year. I was so happy with the performance.”
Maple Grove, last year’s Class AAA high-kick champions, won the Class AAA jazz competition Saturday. Wayzata, Class AAA state champions in jazz in 2010, finished second this year.
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Section 1AAA place-winners Lakeville North and Burnsville qualified for the 12-team state meet but didn’t advance to the six-team finals.
“We asked the kids to have their very best performance of the year and they peaked at exactly the right time," said Eastview head coach Jenny Raiche. "The turn combos are usually the most difficult part of the routine and they hit their turn combinations today and they just performed. They had a lot of confidence and a lot of grace and really performed well tonight.
“Last year we graduated 10 great graduating seniors off of our jazz team, which left four returning members,” Raiche added. “And so most of our members were either on JV last year, or we had one freshman. So I think we expected to do well, but not as well as we did. I mean, these kids, they didn’t want to be the team who lost all the great kids, they wanted to be the comeback team who was still just as strong.”
Eastview, four-time Class AAA state champions in high kick, will compete in the high kick half of the state meet Saturday, beginning with qualifying competition at 2:15 p.m.
