The WJ Poms team’s performances are the highlight of halftime at football games. The team walks out with their pom poms and marches in-sync to begin their routine. The music starts and they begin their routine which usually consists of extraordinary jumps, turns, kicks and hyping up the crowd with the infamous “snake,” where they connect their pom poms to form a moving snake.
At the recent varsity football games against Quince Orchard and Wheaton High schools, Poms went a different route. In addition to their usual choreography, they added some viral Hip Hop-esque TikTok dances that spread widely amongst the app.
TikTok creators make these dances which go viral, they become really popular and grow traction amongst millions of users. As we can see, its effect is so drastic that some of the dances make it to high school poms team’s performances.
At halftime for the Quince Orchard vs. Walter Johnson football game, Poms added one of the trending dances, “Poof Be Gone” in a canon which was quite a surprise. A sea of voices around asked, “Why are they doing this?”, “TikTok dances, really?” Many just giggled. I couldn’t help but notice that the crowd was all smiles, some were even dancing and singing along.
Oftentimes, people look at these dances and think they are cringey because that is what most people associate with TikTok dances. These dances have gained traction and popularity on the internet because they are brought to high school football games where a vast majority of the spectators know what these dances are; of course it is going to be attention-grabbing.
Trending TikTok dances seem to be a subject of great controversy in Poms routines. Maybe Poms should stick to their conventional routines of jumps, turns and kick sequences? Maybe they should just do the “snake” over and over to make the crowd scream at the top of their teenage lungs. But, that’s not really what the crowd wants, they want hype and they want variation.
Understandably, it is a shock because all that we have seen from the Poms team has been what we always see. However, this shock shouldn’t have caused this much of an uproar because it was new, exciting and different. People may say that they didn’t like it but it definitely did not deserve the reaction that it received. These TikTok dances might not be traditional but they sure can get the crowd pepped which is really their goal for these halftime performances.
Poms routines never fail to put a smile on students’ faces during their performances. There is no doubt that these routines are of the utmost importance to our games, I can’t wait to see more from them!
