Cut Choreography Costs: A Coach's Guide to Choreographing Your Own Routine
Choreography can take up a big chunk of a scholastic program's budget. With this beginner-friendly process to create a competition-ready routine, you can confidently choreograph your own routine while keeping costs low. There isn't a one-size-fits-all approach to choreography, so use this process as a starting point and adjust it to fit your team's strengths and your competition's scoresheet.
Playing into your scoresheet
Familiarize yourself with whichever scoresheet your state or competition uses to ensure you're compliant with all legalities, including music requirements and routine time limits. Once you’re familiar with the legalities and requirements, you can start assessing the content sections of the scoresheet. Most scoresheets have some variation of the sections: cheer, jumps, stunts, tumbling, baskets, pyramid, dance, and an overall impression. Within each section, there are typically smaller sections with certain benchmarks that will determine what difficulty score you will earn. Much of your difficulty score can be planned before the routine ever takes the floor. For example, in stunting if there is a section solely for twisting skills, you will want to include a variation of a twisting skill that your team can all confidently perform in your routine to get points in that section. You will repeat this process for each small section throughout the entire scoresheet. Having a printout of the score sheet and making notes on the printout is a good brainstorming tool. Don't worry about eight-counts or formations yet.
Laying the foundation
Once you’ve chosen your music, it’s time to start prepping your routine. Begin by figuring out how you want to order the sections of your routine. Don’t forget to account for cheer in this order. Once you feel comfortable with an order (this will likely shift throughout the process), count the total number of eight-counts in your music. Once you have your grand total amount of eight-counts, you can start to lay out how many eight-counts you want allotted for each section of your routine (i.e. dance gets two, jumps get two, etc.). Don’t forget to account for formation changes/transitions!
Separately from the assigned eight-counts you can start to string together skills in those sections you already started thinking of. Jumps is usually the easiest section to input and is a good place to start. For more complex ones like tumbling and stunts just start with a flow chart (i.e. switch up → corkscrew to load → pop through to inversion etc.). Also notice how each aspect of this flowchart hits a small section of a score sheet: release, twisting, and inversion. For tumbling where many things will be happening at once (this also works for dance), do stacked flow charts for different skill levels of your athletes. Make the top one for your beginner athletes and the bottom one for your specialty pass athletes.
Your cheer section doesn’t need to be overcomplicated. After reading your scoresheet you should already have an understanding of what your state values in a cheer section. Different states and scoresheets have different standards of what the cheer section should look like so there's no one approach that works for every scoresheet. A helpful way to figure out what style your state adheres to is watching other routines in your area and looking for common trends. This could be prop usage, the caliber of stunts happening during cheer, are the words crowd-leading oriented or story-telling oriented, or the presence of standing or running tumbling.
Building eight-counts
You’ve allotted a specific number of eight-counts to sections, decided the flow of the routine, and have decided what skills you want in the routine. We officially have all the pieces, it’s time to put them all together. At this point in the process it’s normal to see shifting in the distribution of eight-counts. While you are turning brainstormed flow charts into specific counts you may realize you need more or less eight-counts for a section than originally planned. That is normal just make sure your total stays consistent with your original count. When building eight-counts it can be easy to try to rush stunt sequences to try to fit it into a certain number of eight-counts. Stunt and pyramid will typically take up the most eight-counts so it could be a good idea to build those first and work backwards from there to avoid trying to rush those sections. A way to save yourself time later is to make your eight-counts universal for skill progression. For example, if your team is currently hitting an inversion to prep, choreograph it using counts that would also work for an inversion to extension if they master that skill later in the season. This way, you can upgrade skills without having to rework the timing of your routine.
Formations
Throughout this process you’ve likely been envisioning some formations already. This is a good time to start placing them. If in your tumbling section you have a specific athlete in mind for a specialty pass it may be best to build that formation first. Especially for tumbling, write down the starting and ending formations for each section since they'll often be different from each other. Once you have formations set this is also an appropriate time to start to add fluff. Fluff is the word for the motions in transitions or before a stunt sequence begins that enhances the overall performance score. Fluff also shouldn’t interfere with the counts you already have placed.
It’s normal to have to go back to steps in this process and for your final routine to look worlds different from the first. Every routine you choreograph makes the next one easier, while building a skill that can save your program money year after year. No one knows your athletes better than you, and that insight is one of your greatest strengths as a choreographer!
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