Lincoln Junior High School Poms Team headed to State competition

[February 05, 2018] 

LINCOLN

The Lincoln Junior High School Poms Team is headed to the Illinois Drill Team Association (IDTA) State competition. Ten young ladies from Lincoln Junior High School make up the Trojanettes Poms Team and they successfully competed over the weekend and earned a shot at advancing to state competition to be held this Saturday in Springfield at the BOS Center (formerly the Prairie Capital Convention Center).

The members of the state-bound Trojanettes are:

Emma Boyd - Captain
Makayla Koehne - Captain
Kylee Overton
Kate Stoltzenburg
Hailie Koontz
Julia Guzzardo
Shelby Webb
Annastaja Buffington
Sommer Bohannon
Claire Duffer

These ladies are coached by Emily Martinez of Lincoln.

Martinez, who received her dance training at Audra’s Studio of Dance in Lincoln, is in her first year coaching the Trojanettes and to her knowledge the team started competing several years ago and this is the first trip to state for a Lincoln Junior High School Poms Team.

“I started dancing when I was about three years old, so I’ve always been a part of dance,” said Martinez. "I did competitive dancing in high school with the Railettes. After I graduated I took a year off and then I found out that the position was available at the Junior High and I thought I’d give it a shot. The girls all wanted to compete and I thought it would be fun for them to compete. So we did."

"We compete through the organization called IDTA. They hold regional contests throughout Illinois and so far we’ve competed in three regional contests. We started out a few weeks ago in Clinton. We did another competition in Mattoon and we bumped up our score a little bit there. This past weekend we took a shot and drove to Highland, Illinois, which is about two-and-a-half hours away and we bumped up our score again and hit it right on the dot to get the qualifying score. We were .7 over,” said Martinez, who was coached at Lincoln Community High School by Railettes Coach Brande Montgomery.

Photos provided by Emily Martinez

Montgomery, in fact, has helped Martinez a great deal this season. “She’s been great help this year with it being my first year,” said Martinez. “She helped me figure out everything that I needed to do. From helping me get the girls into these competitions to the costumes. The costumes we are using are actually costumes they used last year. She also let us use poms. She really was there to help us out with everything.”

Martinez said the team started practicing in October and coming up with ideas for routines at that time. “We pick our own music,” she said, “and we are in the category called Pom-Dance.”

Martinez also said Lanae Laubenstein has been helping with the team a lot and she considers Lanae her assistant. “She has come to practices and we both, especially coming back from competitions, you get vocal feedback, so we'd both listen to the feedback and then we’d tweak things here and there. It’s much easier having two minds put together to figure things out,” laughed Martinez.

The first-year coach is very proud of her team. "They are a pretty great group of girls,” said Martinez. "I mean starting out we were pretty far away from getting the goal but we came back and we changed things. They handled the changes really well. They just keep improving each time and it is amazing to see how much they have improved from the beginning of the year.”

A trip to state is quite an accomplishment to be proud of for these girls, who also perform at the halftime of Lincoln Junior High School boys basketball games as well as girls basketball games.

Good luck on Saturday at the IDTA State Competition!

[Teena Lowery]