(Photo by: Jasmine Mills)

“Thank you for being a friend. Travel down the road and back again.” … Oh no, that’s not these Golden Girls! JCCC’s Golden Girls are pretty different from Dorothy, Rose, Blanche and Sophia.

“The Golden Girls dance team was founded in 1999,” Golden Girls’ coach Amy Sellers said. “We don’t have cheerleaders on campus, so we do stand on the sidelines during home basketball games and a few volleyball games and do cheers like cheerleaders, but we don’t stunt. We’re definitely not cheerleaders, we’re definitely dancers. We perform at timeouts, and then also at half time during those games.”

The team performs mostly at volleyball games but still performs at a few other games in the fall.

“We do a couple of soccer games, and like I said, a couple of volleyball games, and then all of the home basketball games for both men and women,” Sellers added. “And then we are also a very competitive team. So we compete at our competitions, we have regionals in March, and that’s against all of the community colleges in Kansas. And then we go to Nationals in Daytona Beach, Florida in April,” Sellers said.

The Golden Girls name is actually a reference to the college’s colors and is used by a lot of dance teams.

“Our colors were maroon and gold at the time, and now they’re navy and gold,” Sellers said. “There’s a lot of dance teams that use that. So it’s a popular dance team name.”

Even though the team competes in the spring, they still have a pretty busy fall.

“[In the] fall we are doing a lot of our prep stuff, but that’s also when we’re dancing and performing at the volleyball games and the soccer games, and then basketball actually starts at the end of October, beginning of November. So that really only leaves us two  months,” Sellers said. “What we just finished up was our big calendar shoot, which is a big fundraiser for us. We call it media days because we use them for social media and a lot of our printed stuff. We also videoed our hype video that will play before each of our performances, like the basketball teams and volleyball teams do. But then we also learn our competition routines. So we are very busy in the fall.”

This year the team is made up of 13 girls that are split into two teams for the fall basketball games.

“In the spring, we all go to all of the games,” Seller said. “In the fall, so November and December, kind of those pre-season games, they aren’t always the same night. So sometimes we could have, you know, three, four games in one week, but [we] split them up into, we call it Navy and Gold, just different groups. This year I have 10 freshmen, so this is their very first semester in college and that can take a lot of getting used to. That’s their first finals that they’re coming up on so we just want to make sure that they’re not getting overwhelmed and they have that time to still balance school and work and all the other things.”

Being a part of the team is a commitment, practice is everyday from 8:30 to 10:30 a.m., meaning that these full-time students cannot schedule a class before 11:00, and some of them even have a job. On top of that, they have different routines to learn depending on if they are performing at a game or at a competition.

“All of our halftime routines, we try to learn those early on. Even if they’re not performance ready, we try to learn them, practice them, make sure that they at least know them,” Sellers said. “For example, this week, they already know next week’s performance, but this week we’re starting a competition routine. So they have to learn this competition routine, but then come back next Monday and have to know that routine from last week because they’re going to perform it [at a game].”

Before they start performing full-time at the basketball game, the girls will be performing at one more volleyball game on Wednesday Oct. 15, when the Cavaliers will face the Kansas City Kansas Community College Blue Devils at home at 6:00 p.m..

The Golden Girls calendar will be available for sale at games as well as at the Center for Student Involvement. If you know a member of the team, you can also ask them, and you can be on the lookout for links on their social media.