Judges

Judges look for a variety of things in a routine. From formations to wow factor, they judge everything. Each judge is different and depending on where you go or wherever you compete there’s going to be different judges. Each judge can score you in a different way than from the judge sitting right next to them, and sometimes there’s even unqualified judges.

Judge’s look at everything, all the way from your starting formation to your ending pose. They judge the music, costumes, use of floor, faces, projection, energy, formations, technique, angles and sharpness. They judge each category out of ten for a total out of one hundred, depending on the competition of course, sometimes it’s out of a total of seventy or something else. At my school we always aim to be within ten of the total points you can earn. Our coach tells us that we should always get ten out of ten in the category of faces and projection because our faces should always be on and our showmanship to the crowd should always be there in its fullest. After each competitions we take the judges’ comments toward our routine and either change or practice more the parts that still need work or that we messed up in our routine during the actual competition.

There are so many different judges and each judge judges differently as well. One judge can say something entirely the opposite of the other judge sitting right next to them. Each judge notices something different, which can either help or hurt you depending on what and if they notice. As I mentioned in my  blog post before, that faces can be used to hide your mistakes. Sometimes one judge can notice a mistake and another judge won’t, thus helping you in your score better than if both judges noticed your mistake. This can also go the other direction though, if both judges noticed your mistake than that will hurt your score, but if both judges notice your mistake than this gives you certainty that you need to fix this mistake, thus ultimately helping you in the future.

 

Sometimes though there are unprofessional or unfair competitions. Every now and then, hopefully less, you are judged by an unqualified judge. At a competition that my team went to a couple of weeks ago, for solos, one of the judges was a dance mom. Obviously unqualified to judge. Not that she judged her own daughter or anything as extreme or unfair as that, but she had no previous experience to dance and therefore unqualified to judge fairly and correctly to the dance world today.