On Sept. 21, the duPont Manual Dreamers approached the gym floor, praying they would perform their best and get approval from the other students.

The Dreamers had a bad couple of years after my freshman year, because the team was senior-dominated. After the seniors left, we had to rely on the few people we had left. Also, we lost support from the students and administration. Even some of the teammates gave up on the team. They would complain about how we aren’t doing competitions, and they didn’t want to be patient. As a team, I feel you have to believe that you can get to the point you want to be. But they never even gave us a chance. Bashing the team behind our backs, claiming that we suck — what type of team is that? I understand that things get tough and the easiest thing to do is ignore the problems or just give up, especially when no one puts effort in any of it.

Our reputation was horrible. People would ask when our practices was. Some people didn’t even know we had a step team. People were assuming that we weren’t anything but a club.

It took hard work and dedication for us to get our reputation back together. We had tryouts the second semester to try to recruit new steppers, but we didn’t have that much luck. There were only about five more people that tried out for the team. So we as a team had to come up with a plan to recruit more people. We decided to have tryouts for the upcoming freshman. The turnout was incredible; while we expected only a couple of freshman, we received a senior boy and a sophomore boy along with 14 girls. For the veteran steppers, that made us very excited. It gave us a sense of hope and determination to excel to better place as a team.

It takes more than people to make a team. Being on a team is like being a relationship: it takes patience, trust, hard work, and dedication. Most people don’t understand that. They come to practice thinking about themselves. That’s another thing, we have made more rules during practices. Teammates like to talk while we’re learning new steps, or working on a dance. We require all teammates to be at practice no later than 2:45 p.m. and if you are late, you have to do push-ups. There is no eating during practice, or going to eat somewhere and coming into practice to eat. It distracts us at practice, and makes the other teammates upset. ut it will all work out in the end, when we win our first competition, or get a great review on our next performance.

I still feel like people doubt the Dreamers, but that gives us more reason to kill and do our best at every event and competition that we enter this year, and to win back the school’s approval once and for all.