Blinn College is home to seven multi-award-winning sports teams, but the two most recent award-winning teams aren’t your everyday sport. Often overlooked as just entertainment, the Blinn College Buccaneers Cheer and Dance teams bringing a high level of competition and entertainment to all those who watch.
Though these two teams may look similar at first glance, each is unique with different goals in their performances, head cheer and dance coach Sarah Barland Flisowski says. The cheerleading team focuses on gymnastic moves, while dance is about trying to make the audience feel something.
“On the cheer side, they learn a routine, then the music is put on top of it. The gymnastics and tumbling aspect is very important on the advanced competitive side, and they pick up people,” Sarah says. “On the dance side, it is very picturesque and interpretive as to what we can make people feel. We have our music first, and then the music makes the movement.”
Community members can expect to see the cheer team supporting various Buccaneers athletics teams, but that is just one aspect of what the team does, Sarah says.
“Cheer is not just what you see on Friday nights or Saturdays at football games — it is way more than that,” Sarah says. “We do the competitive side where it is based on music. If those students are tumbling all over the place, throwing each other up in the air all at the same time, it’s a lot to watch. While we are supportive of our college, we are also our own entity and we have goals and aspirations to win national championships.”
In addition to cheerleading, the Blinn Treasures Dance Team also performs at games and events. However, they are not the typical Texas drill team, as their choreography is very unique.
“We are not going to do a lot of high kicks or streamer jazz,” Sarah says. “We’re going to do more stylized jazz — we’re going to do that hard-hitting hip-hop. We’re going to do a fast-paced pom dance to real music and try to get you to feel some kind of way. We’re also going to do aerials and handsprings and crazy stuff that we’re trying to prepare for nationals."
Even though both teams are distinctly their own, the type of people on the teams have the same qualities, Sarah says. In fact, the Blinn cheer and dance is shifting to a recruiting style when it comes to choosing new members.
“A lot of schools do recruit clinics where you come in, and you dance with a bunch of people, and if we
think you are a good fit, we will ask you to come back,” Sarah says. “We are both advanced teams, so we are looking for those advanced, high caliber skills and a drive to be competitive. We want to win. We don’t want to just sit around and watch everybody else. We want them to have that drive and the want to be better.”
The Blinn cheerleading team has won six Small Coed Division II National Cheerleaders Association awards back-to-back. Additionally, the Blinn Treasures Dance Team recently earned their ninth National Dance Alliance championship title this spring.
“I mean, it’s pretty amazing — there are not a lot of colleges out there that can say they have that many awards, even with combined teams,” Sarah says. “With us, it’s like being compared to Navarro in our conference, but they only do cheer. SFA has a combined like 30-something awards between their cheer and dance teams, so with us being a smaller two-year college, it’s super important for us to be seen in that way, so we can have high caliber athletes coming to our
teams.”
Being a member of these teams is not easy, Sarah says. Even though the cheer team competes in only one competition per year and the dance team competes in two competitions per year, they are constantly practicing to perfect their routines.
“Each team practices for at least 10 hours a week, two hours every weekday,” Sarah says. “We also try to do as many show-offs as we possibly can, just to get out in front of people beforehand.”
While the teams spend a lot of time practicing, Blinn's primary goal is pushing their students to get an associate's degree to prepare them for the next step in their education or athletic career. Sarah says she recently had five of her sophomore athletes go on to dance or cheer at other universities, including the University of Houston, Stephen F. Austin University and the University of North Texas.
“Seeing my athletes grow and being able to get them to where they want to go next is my favorite thing,” Sarah says. “It is seeing them decide what their major is going to be and if they want to go to a competitive team after us or if they just want to do something completely different. I enjoy watching them grow as people and cheerleaders or dancers and picking what they want to do with their lives."
Unlike four-year universities that keep the same athletes for a while, Blinn College is a two-year junior college, so their cheer and dance teams have a very high turnover rate. Sarah says that is what makes her teams so thrilling to watch.
“For us, every year is different,” Sarah says. “Our turnover rate is almost half every year, so it’s a completely different team every single year. That’s what makes it exciting.”
If you want to watch the award winning Blinn Treasures Dance Team or the award winning Blinn Cheerleaders, you can catch them in Brenham at every home football game on Saturdays. You can also watch them perform at every home volleyball game, as well as every home men’s and women’s basketball game.
“If you come out and support Blinn athletics, you’re going to see us there, and you’ll be able to see that we are not just a typical cheer and dance team,” Sarah says. “We’re going to be fun, exciting and supportive of our sports groups.”
