From March 14 through 18, 2019, Abraham Lincoln High School’s dance team, the Convertibles, was at the Dance Nationals-USA.  The event has drawn teams throughout the western United States and farther since 1986. Lincoln’s team was down in Southern California Anaheim, California competing with nearly 2,000 other competitors and nearly 4,000 spectators over that weekend, competing for the Champion title in one of over 55 different divisions.

Lincoln Lion Tales interviewed Camillo Cervantes, a junior who is in the Convertibles team, before the competition and he was “both excited and nervous. I’m excited because we get to go to Disneyland and are able to be even better friends with my team. I’m nervous because, well, we have to perform in front of the judges and all we want is to make each other proud and all we want is for everyone to show all their talents and strengths.”

If they were to win first place in any of their dances, they would have receive a backpack, badge, and if they were to win overall, they would have gotten a poster that would’ve proudly been hung up at school. Cervantes mentioned that the coaches, Frankie and Danny, have said that, in order to win, they must first believe in it and push towards that goal. 

We asked him how important he believed this was and he gave a passionate and warm response. He said, “This nationals coming up is super important because, all through the competitions we’ve had, we’ve been sailing through and surviving, which is okay to do, but this nationals we have to put in our all because we know that we’re going to go against people who are at our level, I think that’ll make it more fun. Because there are teams that are way better than we are, we expected the worst, but since this nationals its all the [teams] who dance at our level, the competition seems fair enough and makes it more intriguing.”

Cervantes told us that they were going to be “going against the highest scoring teams and it means we now have real competition. It makes me work harder so that we can place the highest we are able to.” 

Unfortunately, things did not got so well for the team. Students around school kept mentioning things did not go good during the competition for Lincoln’s team, but when we asked Cervantes about it, we did not got any answers. Of course, we understand that a loss about something one is so optimistic about isn’t really the best, so we understand.  Congratulations to them for making it to nationals though! They did their best and that is what matters.

Not everything came out so bad, one of the Convertible team members, Zaira Ramirez, was approached by Arizona State University and invited to audition for their dance team. She will be going to their dance clinic, audition for a spot, and hopefully get in. So, another congratulations to her for getting noticed by a big university!