On the Denver Nuggets Dancers team, there are teachers, accountants, real estate and insurance brokers and many more professionals who perform in front of tens of thousands of people for 41 games a year, not including the playoffs. The competition to earn one of the coveted spots on the dance team is fierce, too, with over 150 applicants submitting materials for review for the upcoming NBA season. Only sixty were called in to audition.
On July 12, one side of the Denver Nuggets practice court was filled with the dancers who'd made it into the extensive audition process, mimicking the upper-body movements of a quartet performing choreography they’d all just learned.
After executing the same dance, each can shine by inventing their own closing moment with acrobatics, the splits or other routines. The group of sixty was quickly split in half to thirty dancers, who will compete in a training camp before the final squad forms in August.
Prospective members who have been on the dance team before asked for their last names to be withheld, as many dancers have dealt with stalking over the years. Those who make the final cut will launch into around eight hours of rehearsal each week until the NBA season ends. Members of the team say the work is worth it.
“Ball Arena is electric on game nights,” says Nicole, who is currently auditioning for her fourth season on the squad. “I spent so many years of my life building up my technique and doing recitals and competitions. Doing it at a professional level, you just feel like all those long nights when you were a little kid are truly worth it.”
Along with the adrenaline of game day, Nicole says the sisterhood and supportiveness of the team keep her coming back.
Sisterhood is built through an intentional push by Amy Jo Johnston, Denver Nuggets Dancers manager and choreographer. Entering her eighteenth year with the team, Johnston says she is often reminded of how kind and hardworking the Nuggets dancers are.
“Unfortunately, because of some of the dance shows, [dancers] have a bad reputation of being kind of snotty or just being very selfish,” Johnston says. “You're not going to find that here. You're going to find that people are genuinely nice humans, that they are huge Denver Nuggets fans, and they just want to use this platform to do some good, to put some smiles on people's faces.”
But first, they have to make the team.
Wednesday, July 17, was the final day of auditions before training camp. Dancers who made it that far will create a solo routine to showcase their talent. By then, the competitors had already made it through two dance audition cuts, a photo shoot and two rounds of interviews.
Johnston herself was an NBA dancer with the Phoenix Suns for six years and a member of the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury Hip Hop Squad for seven years, plus two seasons on the dance team for the now-disbanded Arena Football League’s Arizona Rattlers.
“Back in my day, they used to just have a two-day audition process,” she remembers. “Every single year, we would have people quit, or we would have conflict on the team because we didn't take time to get to know each other and to really see what we were signing up for.”
Like Nuggets players, dancers spend as much time together as they do with their families during the NBA season, which starts in October and can run as late as June if the team is competitive, and the Nuggets have been lately.
“We've tweaked it over the years, but ultimately it comes down to looking at, 'What do I expect them to do when they join the team, and how are we evaluating each of those roles?'” Johnston says.
Johnston doesn’t make the decision alone. She has a nine-person judging panel that helps her evaluate the dancers. Judges include other Kroenke Sports and Entertainment employees who help with in-game presentations, like PawS the DJ, former Denver Nuggets dancers and the team’s director of youth basketball. They deliberate for hours to decide who will make the team, according to Johnston.
Switching Teams
Hopefuls this year include Marissa Ferrin. Ferrin, previously a dancer for the Oklahoma City Thunder, says the Nuggets offer a lot of prep classes compared to other NBA teams. In those classes, dancers can meet those who they’ll be working with and become attuned to the style of the Nuggets dancers.“It's like you're never really alone,” she says. “Prep classes honestly build friendships right away.”
A Denver local, Ferrin wanted to dance for her hometown team, so she asked the accounting company she works for if she could relocate. Ferrin also choreographs on the side, including internationally, and says choreographing in the NBA one day is a dream of hers.
“Dance is pretty much my life,” she says.
That’s the conclusion for many other Denver Nuggets Dancers hopefuls, including Julie Klemm, who bedazzled her own Nuggets outfit to show her dedication to the team. Each dancer is required to either be a full-time student or work a job in addition to their dancing duties.
Juliana Moore is auditioning for the third time after making it to finals in her previous two attempts.
“Even if it was for free, I would probably still do it,” Moore says. “We do a lot of work that goes into the game, and we’re a big part of it as the connection between the game day and the fans. You’re doing more than just putting on a pretty outfit.”
The dancers also help with appearances for special and charity events along with coaching the junior dance team for kids or the Sizzlin’ Seniors and Average Joes, two crowd-favorite dance teams for older adults without dance experience.
Nicole says they can easily spend forty hours a week together if the Nuggets have an extended homestand. The kindergarten teacher was previously a Cincinnati Bengals Cheerleader and then a member of the Philadelphia Flyers Ice Girls, but dancing for the NBA and the Nuggets was always the goal.
“I still had this burning desire to be the NBA,” she says. “I submitted my virtual audition to the Nuggets because I love that they do jazz, pom and hip hop, which is very unique in the NBA; a lot of teams do only hip hop.”
Nicole lived in a hotel room for two weeks during her audition process before making the team and moving to Colorado.
The Right Environment
Despite the big sacrifices, Nuggets dancer auditions aren’t like the cutthroat environment portrayed by the recent America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders documentary, which shows the ruthless nature of professional dance squads.“Even people that don't make the team come and they say, ‘This was such a nice group of people,’” Johnston says. “‘From the moment that I started my audition process to the very end of it, everybody was kind, everybody was supportive.’ That's really what sets us apart.”
Not that it doesn’t get stressful. Balancing the dance schedule with their full-time jobs and personal lives isn’t always easy, Johnston says.
Each summer, some of the returning dancers travel to dance conventions in Arizona and Las Vegas to work with choreographers to prepare for the upcoming season. Johnston and the rest of the coaching team choreograph, too, and sometimes team members plan their own routines for events like country night or during shorter timeouts during the fourth quarter of games.
“We just try to give the fans variety, and in order to have a variety of dance routines and genres, and even different selections of music, we've got to start practicing early,” Johnston says. “That's why we have auditions in July.“
The goal is for fans who attend four games in one week to see something new each time, she adds. That includes the outfits.
The team gets one or two new uniforms each year to add to their “huge” closet of outfits, according to Nicole. Coaches mix and match pieces so there’s variety, but there aren’t quite as many combinations nowadays, she says.
“The night we won the championship was a City Edition [jersey] night, so I have my sports bra and my shorts from that night in a shadowbox with the confetti that fell,” Nicole says. “I'm glad we got to keep that one, because that's so special.”
The dancers are paid hourly for their work as part of the team, including appearances that don’t necessarily include dancing.
There hasn’t been a man on the dance team yet, but Johnston says if a man showed up with the right skills and attitude, the team would consider it. She danced on a mixed team in her time with the Mercury, but says the crop of male dancers in Denver is not at the level of the women here.
By the time the NBA season starts, anywhere from sixteen to twenty dancers will make up the final team. Johnston believes they will be just as elite as the athletes on the basketball team.
“These are all extremely hardworking individuals that don't just show up an hour before the game so that they can look pretty and be on TV and be in the spotlight,” she says. “They are nice, nice people that truly care about the fan base, about the community, about the Denver Nuggets.”
