On Apr. 8 until the 11 a vast amount of college dance teams from around the country came to Daytona Beach, Florida, for the National Dance Alliance’s (NDA) 2026 College National Championships including University of Wisconsin-La Crosse’s (UWL) Dance Team. There was a total of six divisions: I, IA, II, III, Junior College and NAIA. The NAIA division was a new addition to the qualifying divisions as of this year; the division is for teams associated with the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA).
Additionally, there were four dance categories, Team Performance, Jazz, Pom and Hip Hop. Team Performance is a combination of jazz, pom and hip hop meaning that each team must demonstrate those three skills in their routine. Their three-day weekend consisted of prelims, finals and championships taking place from Thursday until Saturday.
UWL competed in the third division on Thursday during the prelims and ended in third place with a score of 86.42 in the jazz category. They also placed first in the Team Performance Open Prelims category with a score of 88.2.
Meghann Weisbach, a senior and captain on the dance team was asked about her feelings toward winning the title and said, “I remember my freshman year, we did team performance, and we were so happy just to make it to finals…then everything came full circle and we won the national title in my final year.”
For their team performance, they had a revenge theme. UWL dance team’s Head Coach Kyle Herberg stated, “Comparing it to the very first year that we entered the team performance division we got last…we took critiques and continued making more and more progress each year…its been an ever-growing challenge and I feel like we were just revengeful for ourselves.”
After competing in preliminaries on Thursday UWL was informed they would advance to the finals taking place on Friday, where they competed in division III once again and took third place in jazz and first in team performance. After winning in their division for team performance UWL advanced into the Grand Champion Round where they went up against the winners from every other division. Lucy Trainer was interviewed regarding their win on Friday and stated, “Seeing our hard work being recognized through the articles and the title feels extremely rewarding.”
Unfortunately, UWL did not win in the Grand Champion round; however, they did place third out of the five competing teams in that round. UWL’s Grand Champion score was a 92.67. UWL’s dance team was able to bring home their National Championship title because of their hard work in Friday’s final round.
The UWL dance team is hosting try outs May 2 and May 3. Coach Herberg encouraged new commers who have interest in dance to join these try outs, “go into whatever you’re trying to accomplish with confidence.” The results from the weekend can be seen here and more information regarding try-outs can be found on their website here.
