The Wrap
The 2013 SA Open DanceSport Championships...
by Andrew Howlett
Competitors and Adjudicators from nearly every state in Australia converged on Adelaide for the 2013 SA Open DanceSport Championships. Each year this competition develops with new ideas and events to provide a better service to both studios and the DanceSport competitor.
A positive iniatitive, time permitting, is to provide both a Level 5 event and an Open event for some age divisions. A lot of the lower level competitors are able to dance in numerous events during the course of any one championship, however Level 5 competitors are genearlly limited to just an open event. So where time permits, I think this is a great service to those competitors.
Adelaide is very lucky to have such a suitable venue as the Wonderland Ballroom. It is a fantastic venue, very well suited to a DanceSport competition. Its a shame each state doesn't have such a venue for at least the smaller to medium sized competitions. It would be such a valuable resource. Something to think about for the future.
It was good to see that medalist events continue to support this event, even if the number of competitors in these events aren't huge. Victoria is very fortunate to have a huge number of medalist/recreational competitors and I often wonder why the percentage of registered vs recreational competitors is so vastly different in other states. This development type of competitor is the most important area when we talk about growing our industry. Almost all registered competitors start as a medalist/recreational competitor.
It was great to see good support in all age division, in particular the Masters divisions with a wide variety of events for everyone to compete multiple times.
The Adult Open Standard final was a much anticipated event with Steven Grindsberg and Rachelle Plaas in attendance, only a few days after returning home from the UK. The crowd really appreciated the class and discipline of these two. They demonstrated what it truly takes to become champion.
The Adult Open Latin American event was both a high energy and a high entertainment event with the 2013 NCDC and 2013 SPDC champions both presents to fight it out.
Annalisa and her Icelandic partner Ziggy, took out both the Adult Level 5 Latin American and the Adult Open Latin American Championships. Following closely behind was the current South Pacific Champions, Thabang and Daria.
The organisers of the event did a fantastic job getting Channel 7 on board, coming into to film some of the day's competitions and in particular focusing on the current competitive career of South Australian - Annalisa Zoanetti.
It is great to some of our top competitors supporting competitions in all states. It can be very difficult when flying around the world, to fly around Australia too. It's great to see these guys making the effort. Great work!
The DSA State Open events certainly seem to be turning into an important competition circuit, with competitors trying to pick up as many of the state titles as possible. Perhaps this can be developed further and turned into something significant.
So in conclusion, the 2013 SA Open was another fantastic event run in Adelaide and hopefully with the whole industry in SA working together as a team, the numbers in SA will continue to increase into 2014.
Looking forward to next year's event.
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