When I left for college, I had to say goodbye to not one, but two homes. I had been dancing at my studio for over a decade. My team and my teachers were a family to me, and I loved going to competitions and recitals with them. Every year many other dancers go through this bitter goodbye of their second home. While obviously you miss your teammates and your teachers, there are other tiny things you miss after you hang up your team jacket for good.

1. The familiar floor

You’ve spent years now building up your callouses for optimal performance on your studio’s floor. You know how much force you need to nail a turn and how to land your leaps like a feather. You’ve probably spent a good fraction of your life connected to that floor. But now, if you continue dancing in college, you need to get used to a whole new floor. You don’t know how slippery or sticky this other floor is, you don’t know how springy it is, it may even be a different color. You’ll slowly grow used to it, but all you want to do is run back home and lay on your old and familiar floor back at your studio.

2. The cloud of hairspray and hair gel

Before every single performance, your hair was slicked back into a tight bun and sprayed down solid as a rock. There was never any other cause in your life for you to stab multiple pins into your scalp and then suffocate yourself in a cloud of hairspray. Now, every time you use that hairspray you are momentarily transported back to your bathroom or your dressing room, getting ready for a competition or recital.

3. Adding another competition pin to your team jacket

Your jacket may only weigh less than a pound on its own, but it's grown incredibly heavy with all the competition pins you've put on it. You would organize them by competition and by score. Encore diamonds then platinums, then the Cathy Roe ultimate elites and superiors. Your jacket soon became a trophy display more so than an actual article of clothing. And now that you've moved on it still hangs in display of your years of achievement.

4. The pre-rehearsal coffee

During tech week for every show or recital I would always stop for a coffee. Now, every time I sip a peppermint mocha I’m flooded with memories of driving to the Cherry Hill Village Theatre for Christmas show tech rehearsals. We all had that one coffee that was an unsung tradition to grab before a rehearsal or on the way to a competition. You’d walk into the coffee shop or fast food restaurant in full stage makeup with your hair slicked back into a tight bun that could survive a nuclear apocalypse, and all your straws or cup lids would have bright red lipstick on them by the time they were thrown out.

5. Getting pumped with the team in the dressing room

Every team has that one song that they play to get pumped up for a competition or recital. Your team would play this song and dance to it before every performance, and if anything ever went wrong, it was because you forgot to play the song. For my team, we would play the Riff Off song from Pitch Perfect in the dressing room before every recital. Once a song has been made your team’s pump song, you can never hear it the same way again. Getting hype with the team in the dressing room was always when you felt the greatest.