At the beginning of her sophomore year, Emma Roth, now a junior, decided that she wanted to start a dance club. Roth, along with her friends, wanted to be a part of the WHS athletic community but did not feel like her dance skills fit in with cheerleading or color guard.

Originally, Roth struggled to get her club running. But after joining up with juniors Anna Obsgarten, Katherine Troutman and Elise Colannino, it was much easier to get it established. Roth also found an adviser for the club, English Teacher Kim Fowler.  “We found an adviser that really wanted to help us see it through, so that really helped,” Roth said. The Dance Club was able to start practicing.

Currently, the club has 18 members, all of whom have dance experience. They practice once a week after school in Cafeteria A, although they bumped their practice schedule up to twice a week in the two weeks leading up to their first performance. Roth said the club is currently focusing on performing at the home basketball games, and she wants the club to be similar to college dance teams that perform during halftime at sports events.

However, Roth also emphasized that dancing itself is a sport—one that she wants to be represented at WHS. “Even though it hasn’t been represented in WHS, [dance] is equivalent to any other sport and we deserve to be treated as athletes just like everyone else,” she said. One of the reasons that  she started the club with her friends was that she wanted “to give people who dance outside of school a way to be a part of the school atmosphere like other sports get to do.”

In the future, Roth hopes that the Dance Club will be able to achieve team status at WHS. “I know that it might not be achievable in my time here at Westfield, but I would like to see it as a team and get team status, and hopefully a coach in the future,” she explained. “Even though it’s really fun to do it all yourself and feel that reward once you perform and see what you envisioned come to life, I feel like it would be a lot more efficient in the future and we would be taken more seriously if it was established as a team.”

Roth encourages other students to take the first step in starting a new club when they have an idea. She said, “If you want to start a team, if you want to get something that’s not represented to be represented, then all it takes is hard work and it’s possible.”