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I collected stats on how long it takes for dancers to move between WSDC divisions in their primary role.
The shortest time between someone's first novice point and first all-star point is 8 months (Jesse Vos). The next fastest is 12 months (Melissa Rutz, Samir Zutshi, JT Anderson). (There's actually someone with 5 months, but it looks like a clerical error—before and after their supposed all-star points, they compete in several novice competitions.)
Below is a plot of the distribution of times between first novice point and first all-star point. The dashed line is the median time, and the dotted lines are the 5th, 25th, 75th, and 95th percentile times.
Below is a table of summary statistics for the plot, where "25%" means "25th percentile".
| Stat | Mean | Std. dev. | 1% | 5% | 10% | 25% | 50% | 75% | 90% | 95% | 99% |
| Time (years) | 5.16 | 2.64 | 1.33 | 1.93 | 2.42 | 3.25 | 4.67 | 6.44 | 8.50 | 10.25 | 14.03 |
Though the median time between first novice point and...
This is a post about me coming to like the Riviera Classic and also a bit of a journey about my shoe experience.
I was gifted a pair of these a while back and at first I hated them🤮.
They were too slippy (compared to my Lorenzos) and they kept falling off my feet.
I also found my Lorenzos to be more slippery than I wanted (but at least they stayed on my feet!) so I moved to another pair of street shoes that had just the right amount of grip to lead.
Fast forward a few months add I lost those street shoes😞. I decided to give the Rivieras another shot and I was pretty surprised by how they felt.
Because I had developed my overall stability, I was able to dance just fine in the Rivieras! I was pretty shocked. They also stopped falling off as much because I stopped accidentally tripping myself and ripping the heel off my shoe off.
So overall I changed my mind about the shoe in large part because...
Comment below with your feedback and thoughts on how the forum can be better!
The forum is currently maintained by Vlad Sitalo. If you have questions, bug reports, feature requests, etc that you don't want to share publicly - feel free to DM me on the forum or reach out via FB Messenger or X/Twitter.
My background is in intellectually-driven fields - software development and "rationality", where there's a strong culture of "thinking in public". This means openly sharing your learning experience and insights - working with the garage door up.
I believe that it's an important aspect of what makes those fields develop swiftly and be more accessible to newcomers.
In contrast, the West Coast Swing largely lacks this culture of collaborative inquiry, and I believe that adopting aspects of "Thinking in public" would benefit the community.
What would "thinking in public" look like in the context of WCS?
Learn in Public
The aspect of thinking in public that I believe would be most immediately relevant for the majority of readers is "Learning in Public". You can think of it as tracing the trail of learning.
After you've learned or understood something - share your understanding...
Most of the time you don't actually need to go and check all of the above: the event website would often link to the appropriate results aggregator.
"Event Express Pro" - One of the competition score aggregators. There is no general overview page, but you can see results for events for a given year, by going to the URL for that year, for example for 2024 you get: http://eepro.com/results/2024/
Try one of:
This is terrible you say, surely there must be one place to rule them all? Well, kind-of:
- SwingPoints App is one of the places that aggregates results for all the events, but you can only see information for the finals.
- (Available for both iOS and Android, but a lot of things are broken on Android 🙁)
A WCS convention in Ashland, OR
What makes SO Swing special
- You can win a mug for surviving to a breakfast club
- They explicitly target “small event feel” and limit tickets to 400 participants
Q&A
- Do they give you a rubber wristband that you can put on the water bottle after?
- Yes
- Where do they post the competition scores?
Taygra dance shoes that look like Vans https://www.taygra.shoes/products/urbano-floral-grey
Very fast/spinny (faster then Taygra Corrida) in their final form, but it takes them maybe a week or two of wear to achieve the final form. The mechanism behind that is that the outer edge of the outsole is rubber-ey and so it'll grip the floor. But after a bit of use it gets worn down and so the main plastic part of the outsole is what in contact with the floor thereafter.
Here is a picture of my outsole with worn-down edges:
This also suggests you can accelerate the process of the shoes becoming faster with a measured application of the file to the edges, but I haven't tried that!