Texas drill team competition amid push for UIL sanction

Alright, we want to take you out now live to Katy where there's a lot of fun happening at Legacy Stadium. We're talking hundreds of dancers competing today. The Texas Dance Educators Association fall contest. Sacra Gray is there live with a whole bunch of cutie patootie smiling faces. Lucky am I this morning I get to be surrounded by all of these beautiful faces. Stadium in Katy, where all of these dancers have just taken the field. This is a massive competition happening out here. How are we feeling, ladies? Ladies? Yeah! Good! Hopefully all of them nailed their high kicks and their leaps and their turns. These ladies certainly know how to put on a show. When we think about the Friday night lights and those halftime performances, it's a quintessential part of the Texas tradition here. But up till now, it has not been UIL sanctioned. So by 2028, they could be on track to get UIL sanctioned. We've spoke with dancers about what this could mean for them if they do get state approved. For those who aren't familiar with dance and drill, can you explain what you guys do leading up to competitions like this? Leading up to competition, we usually have a lot of rehearsal either in the morning or in the afternoon. We have a period during the day where we have dedicated time to rehearse with our teammates, where we work on our motions, where we work on our technique, and we work on performing for the football season. Usually we'll do these dances for our football team, so you'll see us perform these dances at halftime. And then here when we come to things like TDA assessment, we are performing these dances to be evaluated by judges. So a lot of hard work goes into the glamour that's on the field. What do you think people don't know about dance and drill when they maybe just see one performance and don't see all the hard work behind the scenes? They definitely don't know how much time that we put into this. I'm telling you, our team is here at 545 every morning on our football field or in our dance gym. We're working so hard in whatever weather conditions we have, especially when we're outside. It's either hot or it's cold or it's wet. Or there's so many other things where we've worked in and we've just continued to consistently show up. And people don't see that until we take it to the field and we show them what we've been working on. And if you guys, you know, you're on track to potentially get recognized in 2028, what would that mean to you if the state is able to recognize Dance and Drill? It just, it would be so wonderful. Dance has been a part of all of our lives and it's such a big importance of us feeling involved in the school and in our community. And it would be such a huge thing for the state to recognize something that means so much in our hearts. It's going to be fun for us to do a quick roll call. First we're going to start with the Seven Lakes Sapphires. The Bengal Brigade. And then we've got the Fosher Storm. All but mighty. We've got the Taylor Pace Setters. Good job. Well done to all the dancers that have competed out here today and from here on out in 2027 TDEA is looking to launch a pilot program. So a test run if you will of what a state championship could look like and if that goes smoothly then that means they could get the green light to get UIL sanctioned by 2028. And what that means is that dancers would eventually be state recognized. They could have increased funding. This could change safety protocols. This could also mean that coaches could get a pay bump as well. So we'll have to wait and see if they're able to get that state sanctioning. But until then, these lovely ladies get a lovely pat on the back for all of their hard work today.