These Utah high school dancers transform into warriors

It was 9 a.m. in Draper and the Corner Canyon Charelles were hoping for a victory. They had been up since 5 a.m., and they had danced for 14 hours that week on top of high school, homework and part-time jobs. The sun was high above the jagged Wasatch Mountains as the Charelles rehearsed for the Rocky Mountain Invitational, a dance competition with 34 high school teams from the region.

The 31 dancers — sweet, good-grades types — smiled and readied themselves to practice their routine on the basketball court of the Corner Canyon High School gym.

As the music started, their expressions transformed from sunny to martial: bulging eyes, angry scowls, full-faced frowns. Between synchronized lunges, lifts and kick lines, they puffed out their cheeks and chests as if holding their breath. They wrinkled their noses like they had smelled something bad.

Occasionally there were vocals, delivered with a punchy “huh” like a warrior call.

“This might sound weird but I, like, slap myself before we go out,” said Bella Lewis, 18, the team’s president. “I slap my arms and I slap my legs. I’m, like, fuming at the ears by the time we finish.”

This is military dance: highly synchronized routines that feature tight fists, hands in blades and bent elbows thrust into sharp lines. It’s a major competition category in Utah, and one of two traditions that make drill team — precision dance practiced by high school troupes across the South and Southwest — distinct in the state. The other is drill down, a little-known kind of game, not unlike Simon Says, in which dancers can’t move until they hear a caller give a command. Though it’s most practiced in Utah, drill down has attracted millions of viewers on TikTok.

Military and drill down are part of drill team, itself part of the ultracompetitive world of high school dance. Drill team, which originated in Texas and evolved from pep squads in the 1930s, can look similar to the unison kick lines and domino-like ripples of the Rockettes. But it also encompasses jazz and hip-hop numbers, and football halftime performances in cowboy hats and boots.

In military, a style all its own, dancers move in lunges and squats.

“There’s cursive” — or contemporary dance — said Brittany Nordhoff, the Charelles’s coach, who also judges national competitions; and then there’s military, or “block letters, with exactness and punctuation in every single thing. There’s going to be periods, there’s going to be exclamation points throughout all that you do in military.”

There are elements of hip-hop, kick line, break dance, cheer and swing, but very little, if any, formal dance technique is needed. “Anyone can be good at military if you really pay attention to the exactness of it,” Nordhoff said, “and learn it the right way.”

The judging rubric is so specific that teams are penalized for leaps and turns and anything dancerly. No cursive here.

And while a few girls each year go on to dance in college, most won’t. (Until recently, the teams have been exclusively female.) But for 20 hours a week — the cap set by the state for time spent on drill team — these teenagers aren’t on their phones. They’re dancing.

DRILL TEAM DEVELOPED from pep squads or “spirit groups” alongside drum and bugle corps in Texas in the 1930s and ’40s.

“They would go down on the field and the band would play for them and they would march back and forth in formation,” said Joyce Pennington, a drill team historian and president of American Dance/Drill Team.

As precision dance expanded, drill down matches became a way to prepare for marching in unison.

In 1929, Gussie Nell Davis, a physical education teacher in Greenville, Texas, started a pep squad. Drills on the football field at halftime soon became dance steps. Across the state in the Rio Grande Valley, Kay Teer started a drill team as a kind of consolation prize for the girls who did not make cheerleader.

As Pennington tells it, in 1939 Dr. B.E. Masters, the dean of Kilgore College (120 miles southwest of Dallas), reached out to Davis with a problem: Too many men were drinking under the bleachers at football games. He thought if there were a bunch pretty girls on the field, people might stay in their seats during halftime. Masters hired Davis to start a drill team and the celebrated Kilgore Rangerettes were born.

Teer then brought drill team with her to a teaching job in Southern California, where it spread to neighboring states, eventually making its way to Utah.

BY THE TIME THE CHARELLES boarded the bus for the competition at Alta High School in Sandy, Utah, that evening, the temperature dropped to freezing. The girls sat in silence with heads bowed as if in prayer, but the quiet was for focus. In darkness, in matching white over-the-ear headphones, they listened to the music for their routines on repeat.

“They’re locked in,” Nordhoff said.

Not only did the Charelles want to win, but they wanted to beat their rival: Davis High from Kaysville, Utah. The two teams were tied for third in the state going into the competition.

The pressure was for glory, but also for something harder to describe, something like presence. For the seniors, it would be their last competition season, the chance to do this thing that only exists during this time in their lives.

Gliding around the competition in a blue track suit with curled hair down to her rib cage was Lauralyn Kofford, the co-director of the Rocky Mountain Invitational and a drill down caller for 20 years. (Nordhoff called her “the queen of drill down.”)

“I love how it just keeps your mind really engaged,” Kofford said. “I mean, these kids are physically beasts. They’re athletes beyond athletes, but their mind is just as important as the rest of their body.”

Drill down, she said, lays the foundation for dancers to move as one unit.

“It trains them to pick up choreography fast, trains their minds to make changes to the routines fast,” she said. “I’m like, practice this with your grandparents. It’s good to prevent Alzheimer’s.”

As a drill down progresses, commands get more complicated, more technical, and more mind-scrambling — becoming a serious test of recall. (Try standing stock still while memorizing “half left face, half right face, right face, left face, hand salute” and then being told to cancel the third command.)

Hesitate? You’re out. Giggle? Out. Looking around? Out. Last woman standing wins.

It can look robotic: a movement stripped of creativity and agency. “Like, I’m literally just waiting to listen to my next command,” said Allie Brown, 16, a junior. “Nothing else is in my brain. It basically is me being a robot. But it’s fun.”

In describing drill down, dancers, coaches and callers kept coming back to one word: “Reward.” The dancers find freedom within structure, with no team to let down.

“It’s weird because I feel like I’m not that present in like, anything else I do,” Brown said.

After the Charelles warmed up in the band room, Nordhoff offered everyone a honey stick — “We shoot them for energy,” she said — and gathered the team for a pep talk.

“You are the strongest military technicians that there are,” she said. “You are a team that should be looked at.”

It was time. The dancers marched onto the basketball court calling out, “Left, left, 6, 7, 8.” The sound of violins whined before transforming into bass-heavy dub step, and they were on. Straddle lifts and athletic jumps, punches and chest pops. In glittering black unitards, they made their warrior faces.

After, they ran back into the band room, breathless: “That felt so good”; “That was the best we’ve done it”; “Holy wow, I’m on a high.” One girl hovered over a trash can like she might be sick.

Between rounds, fans lined up for nachos and hot chocolate, and earplugs ($1), while jazz shoes squeaked against the hallway floors. About 3,400 people had gathered, paying $15 each for a ticket, to watch a high school dance competition.

When it was time for drill down, the teams descended to the basketball court. Everyone was more relaxed with their group routines behind them. Until Kofford started the competition.

“Atten HUT. RIGHT flank,” Kofford called, using vocal fluctuations to accentuate each command like a true drill sergeant.

When only five remained, Cozette Williams, 16, a junior, knew she could take home the top prize for the Charelles. Fans held their breath. Williams was crowned the winner, and her teammates erupted into cheers from the sidelines.

AT AROUND 11 P.M., the Charelles were wired, their bodies sore but filled with adrenaline. As the announcer prepared to reveal the winners, the dancers knelt on the waxed basketball court and bent their heads, their ballerina buns poking up like a cluster of hydrangeas. With eyes closed and fingers linked, they waited.

“Second place: Corner Canyon.”

Davis had beat them in military and best overall. It wasn’t the sweep the Charelles had hoped for (though they did win first in a contemporary dance category), but it was one step closer to the state championship.

Down on the court, where the mood was celebratory, Williams wore her drill down medallion.

“The hard part is the routines,” she said, “so to be able to do your own solo competition after, it’s not like that big of a deal.”

What about the soldierly discipline, the army talk, the rank-and-file drills? Was it strange to be associated with the military?

“I kind of forget that’s what it’s named after,” she said. “But it makes sense. We’re angry and strong the whole time.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.