MIT Open Ballroom Competition!

Y

yanka

New Member
Dear dancers,

The 9th Annual MIT Open will take place on April 2-3, 2005!

The MIT Open Competition is one of the LARGEST amateur ballroom dance competitions IN THE COUNTRY, offering up to 19 dances at 6 levels! In past years, it has attracted over 600 competitors and 600 spectators from across the US.

We are also proud to announce a SHOW BY VICTOR FUNG and ANNA MIKHED – the 2004 British Open Rising Star Standard champions, and the 2004 Ohio Star Standard Show Dance champions!

Registration is at http://www.ballroomregistrar.com/register/MIT05/.

Information regarding tickets for the show and lessons with Victor Fung and Anna Mikhed is available at http://ballroom.mit.edu/comp/show.php.

Hope to see you there!
 
Per the DF policy about drive-by advertising, I'll offer to take a degree of involvement in "supporting" this one. I'm no longer in Boston, and haven't really thought through my formal relationship to the MIT team at this point, but I still know a lot of the people...
 
I finally finished producing all the videos from last year's competition. They are linked from the site in the OP. 55 of the 57 finals were taped.
 
pygmalion said:
What kind of turnout have they had in previous years? Good representation from non-MIT folks? 8)
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Quite good - except when there are conficts, pretty much all the college teams in the northeast (and even from as far away as U. Michigan) plus a number of adults who've become familiar with the collegiate community.

Registration is online so you can see the present size of events, and full results from previous years are there as well, recent years showing all couples with team affiliations when known.
 
The turn out is looking a little down from last year, but that's been the trend across the board at the New England collegiate competitions this year. There always is a major registration surge in the last 12 hours or so of the registration as several teams do "bulk" registration. There also seems to be a growing trend for Championship level latin couples to "hide" until close to the deadline (or just pay a late fee afterward) to avoid publicizing where they'll be.

While we're not conflicting with Rutgers this year, our earlier time is during the spring break of both Brown and Harvard -- two teams that normally bring upward of 30 couples each, so I expect the beginner and intermediate levels to be a heat or two smaller (last year we had ~100 couples in the beginner level). Many of their more advanced dancers are coming back early from their spring break! :)
 
NielsenE said:
The turn out is looking a little down from last year, but that's been the trend across the board at the New England collegiate competitions this year.
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Is there any clue to why that is?

There also seems to be a growing trend for Championship level latin couples to "hide" until close to the deadline (or just pay a late fee afterward) to avoid publicizing where they'll be
Click to expand...

Why would couples not want to publisize where they are going?

I would think the bigger and stronger a comp is in a given level, the more interesting it is to compete at. I like to register myself for comps that I'm going to in advance, so that hopefully the comp is stronger in my level and style and attracts more competitors that want to compete in my events. I hate dancing in direct finals: too much driving for the amount of dancing, so the size of a comp matters a lot to me when I am deciding where I want to go...

why would that be different for champ latin couples?
 
I think the slightly decreased trend is due to several factors:

1) We're seeing a tail off from from the Swing/Salsa surges of the past ~5 years and 3 years ago which generated a lot of cross polination. A lot of the people who joined the college teams in the height of this surges have graduated.

2) The economy has led many schools to give less money to clubs for the past 1-2 years, many teams are feeling a fiscal crunch right now and often have to choose fewer competitions to attend as a team.

3) Several of the medium size competition have become more established, so there's no longer the feeling of any "must-attend" college competitions that used to really help Harvard/MIT/Brown. Yale seems to have shaked their negative reputatiob from a few years ago, both Tufts and BU have shown strong events for several years running, UConn is doing well, etc. I'm seeing growth in college competitions in other parts of the country, leading to a slightly reduced wilingness to travel across the board, etc


I have no idea why the couples don't like to advertise where they'll be... Its the complete opposite of smooth where we try to find out where people will be and flock to the comp .... we want a semi at least, but its hard to get...
 
*drops out of lurk mode*

Normally, I look forward to competing in the MIT competition. However, this year it's a bit different. I can only say that I'm hesitant for a couple of reasons:

1. I think last year's comp could've been run much better.
2. We're not thrilled with the way the sessions are being organized.

I dunno if anyone else feels the same, but those were my thoughts
*drops back into lurk mode*
 
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