Home Court Advantage: A Conversation with the Organizers of Big Apple Dancesport Challenge
This year, the Big Apple Dancesport Challenge’s team of organizers was chosen carefully from a pool of veterans who have hosted the competition before — or at the very least, had been consistently attending and volunteering for nearly a decade. Here, editor-in-chief Carly Mattox chats with BADC chair Yimeng Xu, outreach chair Crystal Song, and registrar William Tong about their own past memories of BADC, as well as their hopes and dreams moving forward for their hometown competition.
All photos courtesy of Hope Chang. BADC features its own gallery of images from the competition, hosted here.
Carly Mattox
This is obviously an event that you, as the board, are passionate about. What does the competition mean to you?
Crystal Song
Well, BADC has been my home comp since 2014, because I joined the Columbia team as an undergrad. And one of the first things I got roped into doing was BADC, I was the volunteer coordinator that year. It's still my favorite thing to do — not wrangling everyone, but I think you get to see all of the good that comes out. People are so enthusiastic about showing up for the community.
Carly Mattox
You really consider it a family, almost.
Crystal Song
I think so. I think it brings out the best in everyone. I mean, it can be a long and frustrating process. But at the end of the day, people are always going above and beyond in the moment. It's just really beautiful to get to see that. We wanted to help run it this year, because the collegiate community was hit so hard by the pandemic and it's not been easy getting all the teams back on their feet. Recruitment and retention is really hard. Almost every team I know has had its funding allocation cut. There's just a lot less manpower and institutional knowledge than there was pre-COVID, so we wanted to come in and keep it a true collegiate event, even though a lot of us are alumni, even alumni from other teams. Our hope is that we can make it a really sustainable endeavor, we want to build it back up to a place where there's a whole pool of people with that knowledge and shared love for BADC.
Yimeng Xu
It's a very important comp for the collegiate scene — you know, as we call it now, it's one of the big three. Since 2015, I haven't missed a single BADC, and over the years, I've helped out in a volunteer capacity, but never in an actual, organized way, until now. I've seen every year just how much undergrad students have suffered during the semester, when they're running it. And I had this idea that it would be much easier if they had more knowledge from alumni who have done this before.
Carly Mattox
So now it’s grad students who are suffering.
Yimeng Xu
Yes, so this means that now grad students* are suffering instead. I think that's my main motivation, to make sure we distribute the work in a way that makes it more sustainable, as Crystal said.
*Both Yimeng and Crystal are PhD candidates, at Columbia University and the University of Berkeley respectively.
William Tong
I don't know, it just feels like there's kind of a home court pride here, you know, like this place is always going to be home for us — wanting to make this competition one of the best in the country and keep it that way is definitely a driving factor. Obviously, ballroom is mainly a competitive thing, so every competition that's a lot of fun for people, it’s just another way to get people to stay, to stick around.
BADC chair Yimeng Xu and his partner, Rachel Liu, dancing championship smooth.
Carly Mattox
So obviously, you all graduated from Columbia.
William Tong
I didn't.
Carly Mattox
Where did you graduate from?
William Tong
Carnegie Mellon.
Carly Mattox
Right.
Yimeng Xu
So did I.
Carly Mattox
Okay, to rephrase, you've all been attending this comp a very long time. I'm curious, how has it changed over the years?
William Tong
[to Crystal] You wanna go first?
Carly Mattox
You went to Columbia, right?
Crystal Song
I did. Yeah. I mean, I feel like I want to give a triumphant answer to this question and say that it's on a steady upward trajectory, which was true pre-COVID. I do think it's important to emphasize that like basically every other collegiate team, the Columbia team is struggling financially — not only because the team's allocation has been severely cut, and facilities costs are higher, but logistically, the community support that we could really take for granted is not something we can rely on anymore, post-COVID. We had a really strong mentorship program, and a lot of the people who have been going to BADC for years and years were part of the program — they were actively volunteering and offering housing. The pandemic has shifted the fault lines in the collegiate community, and I do want to emphasize that it is difficult to get this comp back on its feet. The quality of the comp we want to run is not commensurate with the resources we have both from the university, and from the community. If I'm being real, I think people need to do more. The spirit is always there, but it is getting harder and harder. I don't think that will reflect on people's experience of the comp, because everyone has been doing a really, really good job of putting it together. But behind the scenes, it has been harder to make it work.
Yimeng Xu
There's also a variation because of turnover every year. As Crystal was saying, I think the comp has maintained a certain level of prestige, professionalism, quality — that never disappears. The biggest change this year is that we're running a team match, as opposed to having a professional showcase. I have noticed that showcases seem to be less important post-pandemic than they used to be, and they actually used to be financially really good for the competition and for the team — professional showcases gave us a little bit of funding that would help us run the next comp, and we don't have that source of income anymore. So now, we're almost dipping into finances that were built from previous competitions to continue to run BADC. That means it's not sustainable.
William Tong
To provide a little bit of optimism on the other side of things, I do think that BADC is at the forefront of collegiate competitions in terms of innovation. We actively try to add or change something each year in response to competitor feedback. So — last year, we had Troels and Ina as a showcase couple and they were—are—the World Professional Latin champions. It was very expensive, and it cost a lot of money, and compared to when people went to Michael and Joanna's showcase, who were also the World Professional Latin champions in 2014…there was a completely different density in the room, to put it politely. And so we were like, okay, professional showcases are not what collegiate competitors want right now, we’re going to change that, we’re going to add a team match, we're going to move things around so more people will come to the evening session. We've kept spectator tickets free, because we think accessibility is important. This year, we're adding all-ons for champ quarterfinals — trying to kind of elevate the experience…
Crystal Song
We’ve also added novice smooth.
William Tong
Yeah, which we’ve added back for the first time since 2017. I think we're also starting to build more rapport with other collegiate teams, we’re sharing ideas and bouncing things off of each other. Hopefully, that invites more people to be involved and dance more, because we want to make it more fun — not just for open competitors, but for everyone.
Yimeng Xu
Shout out to DCDI, because we take a lot of our inspiration from DCDI, like TBA rounds. Amazing, genius idea. Thank you, Ricky. Thank you, Emily.* Something else that we have to do to continue building sustainability in this community is to have inter-team solidarity, connections…
*Ricky Semlitz and Emily Dickman have been foundational in the organization of the DC Dancesport Inferno competition.
William Tong
Cross-pollination of ideas.
Yimeng Xu:
Exactly, yeah, this cross-pollination of ideas. We help them run their comp, and they're coming to help us run our comp. And that's really helpful, for all of us.
The winners of BADC’s inaugural team match, George Washington University.
Carly Mattox:
I'm curious — you were all at the intimacy coordination workshop we hosted in June.* Even if it doesn't show up as a legitimate policy or anything, how did it affect your thinking around BADC this year?
*This intimacy workshop was part of this past year’s Dance for Pride programming, a series of events hosted by Waltz Tango Foxtrot every June.
Crystal Song:
There are a couple of outcomes from that workshop — like, for example, we try to provide free housing for our out-of-town competitors, by volunteers who live in the city, and this year I think we wanted an acknowledgement that this is an intimate invitation that we're extending on both ends. We want people to be thoughtful and mindful about that, so we’ve asked people to acknowledge this community expectation, to create a culture of safety, consent, and open communication. We also are making ourselves as a board available to discuss any issues that come up, to mediate as needed. We did the same thing for TBAs — people have had experiences of meeting up with a new partner and…it’s not a great experience. So we also wrote some language around that, we want to be available to people to explicitly mediate any issues that arise with TBA partnerships. I mean, hopefully there are no issues, but I think in future years, we want to keep thinking about that. Especially because, like Will said, every year we've tried to sit down and say, what can we do to advance the values of the collegiate community? I feel like the last big change was when we were finally allowed to have same gender partnerships for the first time.
Carly Mattox:
When was that?
Crystal Song:
2017 — it was my year [as BADC chair].
William Tong:
In 2019, only two years after that, the entire newcomer swing final was either reverse role or same sex couples in the final — there were no traditional couples. That's exactly what should be happening.
Crystal Song:
We love every opportunity to like explicitly name the ways that we can advance the culture.
Carly Mattox:
And it's a level of understanding that hopefully will develop and grow.
Yimeng Xu:
Exactly, like Borough Ball* — the community guidelines are there because, it's not like people don't think those things. But it's important that it's named and said and read.
*Borough Ball is a mixed ballroom social for collegiate and post-collegiate dancers in the New York City area and beyond — learn more by checking out previous events.
Crystal Song:
Yeah. It’s explicit. Policy is not the end-all be-all. But that wasn’t the point of that workshop — really, it showed us that we're still only at the very beginning of having these conversations.
Outreach chair Crystal Song and registrar William Tong dancing championship smooth.