A few things you might not know about the St. John’s University Dance Team: Its dancers are busier than you can imagine. They have a male member. They talk when you’re not looking. And they know exactly what they’re doing when they toss those T-shirts into the crowd during intermissions.
“We strategize, like ‘You get this guy,’” says junior Kelley May. “If you’re loud and you make eye contact, I’ll pretty much throw to you.”
May is one of three captains on the squad and, like most of its members, has been dancing for as long as she can remember. From the local dance studio to the high school team, the 22 girls (and one boy, freshman Tom Herits) have largely followed similar paths, all of which point to the notion that dancing is a serious business worthy of sacrifice.
“A lot of kids get burned out. … You have to love it,” says Christine McCarton, their head coach. “I always say the first day, go buy a planner. You are going to live by your planner. … It’s difficult to find kids that are able to do all those things.”
McCarton says she looks for dancers — “recruits” might be the better word, considering the coaches’ high school connections — who are “pretty well-rounded or involved in a lot of things before.” A glance at May’s schedule makes the importance of those qualifications obvious.
May holds a job at a health food eatery and teaches at high school and middle school dance camps over the summer. She has a full course schedule, studying communications with a minor in business. From September to March, she devotes at least three days a week to practice and dancing events.
And what about those events? They don’t just include basketball and soccer games. They don’t just include pep rallies or charity events like Relay for Life and breast cancer walks. They also feature competition in the National Dance Team Championship, an annual contest at Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando in which 30 of the country’s best college dance teams compete on national television. St. John’s has traveled to nationals each of the last seven years, and the team has finished seventh in the jazz category each of the last two.
“Just dancing on the final stage is the best,” says junior co-captain Roselle Carlino, who describes the experience as “cameras, lights, thousands of people.”
“It makes you want to dance better because there are so many people watching you,” May says.
Their seventh-place finish is especially impressive because St. John’s lacks the dance or performance art programs that help fuel many squads from the South and West. What the team relies on instead is attracting members with academic motivations — “I have really driven students on the team,” McCarton says — and customizing its routines to those members’ dancing proclivities. For the current crop, that means a certain style of jazz dancing.
“We’re more of a thrashy, in-your-face type of jazz team,” May says.
May and Carlino’s academic interests, however, are not enough to fully disconnect them from the sport they’ve known for so long. After graduation, May hopes to start an all-star dance company with her father in their home state of Connecticut; Carlino, an education major, says she wants to coach a high school team and would love to dance for the New York Knicks.
Similar dreams have come true for McCarton, a lifetime dancer who has coached for seven years while serving as a principal at a benefits consulting firm on Long Island.
“Even though I’m not dancing, I still get to do what I love,” she says. “I can’t imagine doing anything in my life that’s not affiliated with dance.”
There’s still one year left in May and Carlino’s college dance careers, so neither one is ready to wax quite as poetically. But they have accumulated their share of favorite moments over the past three years. Some involve the interminable process of studding their National Dance Team Championship outfits, designed by McCarton with help from a costume company. Some involve the experience of dancing in front of packed crowds at MSG during the Big East Tournament. “Getting to dance at Madison Square Garden is amazing,” Carlino says.
But Carlino’s favorite part of the yearly calendar might be soccer season, during which the team “stand[s] out in every single monsoon,” according to McCarton. What Carlino likes is the fact that Belson Stadium’s confines are wide enough for unseen hijinks at the center circle.
“We’re in the middle of the soccer field, and we’re all talking and laughing and joking around, and nobody knows,” she says with a laugh.
The secret is out, then. But that shouldn’t stop the busy girls (and one boy) of the St. John’s Dance Team from serving as accomplished university ambassadors.
“I think that it’s really important they hold the image of the team,” McCarton says. “They get a lot of respect on the campus [and] a lot of admiration from the students.”
