ROARING FORK BROADCASTING COMPANY
Another trip to Orlando, Florida, another flight home with some hardware for the Aspen High School spirit and dance team.
The Skiers returned from a weekend trip to the sunshine state and the Universal Dance Association National Dance Team Championships with a shiny second-place trophy and some “program history:” reaching the finals in two different events.
“It is different,” head coach Gioia Bartalo said via phone on Tuesday. “With game day, our primary focus, our performance routine … that style is hip hop. That’s completely different than what our primary focuses when we compete in the pom division.”
Aspen took second place in its bread-and-butter discipline of poms, the same field that the Skiers won a national championship in two years ago. But they also reached the finals in the game day discipline as well, marking the first time the still-fledgling — yet successful — program has reached that level in two events at nationals.
In poms, the Skiers came within just 0.175 points of a second national title in three years. Competing in the “varsity intermediate division two” (the competitions were sorted by level and school size), Aspen scored an 83.1375, a microscopic distance behind Hopkins County Central High School out of rural Kentucky. The same two teams posted the high scores out of the semifinals in a total field of 24 teams.
Bartalo said that the team is not disappointed to get so close, and it’s a “big lesson” that they’re competing in a subjectively-judged sport. She said that the goal was never to win a national championship — it was simply to put on the best performance and leave it in the judges’ hands.
The Aspen High Skiers celebrate with their second-place trophy from the UDA nationals pom competition. They won the national title in 2023.
Courtesy of Gioia Bartalo
“As a team, our goal for nationals was to walk off of the floor feeling truly proud of our performance,” Bartalo said. “I know that sounds like a ‘Kumbaya session,’ but we didn’t name a scoring or a placement goal for either of these routines because this was about us. … We sat down and we set this goal of pushing for nationals and making it our absolute best performances and making it about our team and not the subjective opinions of judges. We wanted to just take pride in all of the details and in the preparation.”
The Skiers have competed in game day disciplines before, which are akin to what you would see at a halftime show at a football game. This season marked the first time the team reached the finals at UDA in the event.
Out of 24 teams in the semifinals in the “small varsity division two,” Aspen posted the 10th highest score with an 82.55 to advance to the finals. In the finals, Aspen scored an 81.68, good for 11th. North Vermilion High School out of Maurice, Louisiana — outside of Lafayette — won the event with a score of 88.6.
It marked the culmination of another successful season for the Skiers, dating back to the summer when they qualified for nationals. Across the full poms season in Colorado, they did not finish below third place in any competition. They narrowly missed another championship at states in December, finishing just 0.25 points behind University High School in the 2A/3A poms finals.
They graduate four seniors this year: Sydney Andrulaitis, Leilani Hill, Matty Mae Mulberry and Deena Tehrani. Mulberry and Tehrani were named to the all-state team by the Colorado High School Activities Association.
“I think the difference maker was every single person, from start to finish, took so much pride in representing our little ski town on the biggest stage in our sport,” Bartalo said. “Our friends and family fan club showed incredible support this year. Our choreographers, every single individual proudly wore Aspen across their chest and we just made our presence known as a program this year.”