My daughter was part of the hip hop school year te...
My daughter was part of the hip hop school year team. From September through November we had zero issues here and everything was going great. They ended up not having enough dancers to have a younger and an older team so in December they made the decision to combine the two teams. At that point my daughter (age 6) was now with a team that had 10-14 year olds and this is when things started going downhill. When they moved her to the older group, the coaches gave her new chorography and within 3 weeks, she started to get singled out for her mistakes and she was forced to run a lap around the building for every mistake. Over the course of the 75 minute dance practice, the coaches keep a tally of how many mistakes you make and then for every mistake you have to run a lap. On the 2nd to last practice that we went to, the coaches made all of the girls run 1 lap except our daughter had to run 8 laps and the other young girl (age 8) had to run 5 laps. Even her teammates realized how insane it was and they were nice enough to take some of her punishment laps for her. Our daughter s 8 laps took her 8 minutes and once she was finished, her and the team went straight into a routine where she missed 90% of her steps because she was exhausted. They train through punishment and that s their company stance. They don t claim it s punishment but instead it s a way to work on endurance and think about their mistakes . The last day we let her go to practice, we met with the coaches and owner before practice to discuss the amount she was running. We told them how it was crushing her confidence and singling her out was slowly killing her desire to dance. They honestly didn t seem to care and it was pretty apparent that they had no desire to have a younger girl on the team. We even saw the coaches high five each other after we met with them as if they defeated us. Midway through that last practice in the middle of a routine, they yelled at our daughter and made her run while her team finished up the routine and it was clear they were trying to punish her extra hard as retaliation for talking with the coaches. Seeing a 6 year old girl singled out and crying while she runs laps by herself in a massive gym was devastating. At the end of practice, we could tell one of the coaches was lecturing her and after practice, our daughter told us that she had to run 16 laps for all her mistakes that night and since she only ran 5 that night, she would have 11 more laps to do at the next practice. We decided to stop dancing here that night. On a positive note, this company has been sold to new owners and they said they are all about positive reinforcement and the don t do punishment as a teaching tool so we have hope. I just hope that if the current coaches stay they receive the proper training about this change and are held accountable to this expectation. It was an extremely hard decision to pull her out of dance as I wanted her to see it through to the end but we couldn t stand watching her cry before, during, and after practice any more. After telling her that we aren t going to dance there anymore, she still asked if she could continue practicing her dance routine at home. Truly breaks our hearts how this all unfolded and I hope nobody else ever has to go through what we did.
