The Crimson—wearing Marilyn Monroe-pink, form-fitting leotards—performed a diamond-themed routine, dancing to songs like Vanilla Ice’s “Ice, Ice Baby,” Moulin Rouge’s “Diamonds are a Girls Best Friend,” and the DeBeer’s theme song.

“A lot of teams think it’s more important to be up-to-the-minute with their music, and they end up having the same songs as everyone else,” Cameron says. “So I think that [songs like “Ice, Ice Baby”] set us apart a little bit.”

During the preliminary round on April 1, Harvard posted a 9.13 score—tied for sixth-best with George Washington—to advance to the final round. 13 of 26 teams advanced.

In the finals the next day—where all teams perform the same 2:15 compilation of jazz, funk and pom as they did in the prelims—the Crimson improved its final standing slightly, beating out George Washington for sole possession of sixth and falling only one-tenth of a point behind Wright State of Ohio for fifth.

AN UPHILL FIGHT

Though not the squad’s top performance at nationals—it finished fourth in 2002—it was a material improvement over last year’s 12th place showing and the highest finish of any non-scholarship squad in the division.

Yes, you read that correctly. Most nationally-competitive dance programs—such as perennial Division I national champion Towson—offer stipends and partial scholarship to their members, who they also recruit while in high school.

They have corporate sponsors, coaches on salary and professional choreographers.

In comparison, the Crimson Dance team sometimes doesn’t even have a place to practice.

“We are pretty much a club as far as Harvard is concerned,” Cameron says. “We get as much funding as the Texas Club. We have to fight with the people who play Aikido for fun for money. So we have entirely different circumstances than the teams we compete against, and we still completely held our own.”

With its limited budget—derived from small UC grants, club sport funding and squad-organized fundraising—the team did hire a coach this year, Meli Currie, who the captains credit with adding structure to their practices and call “instrumental” to this season’s success.

However, much of the burden of running the team still falls on the shoulders of Daniels and Cameron. The pair usually decides on routines, formations and personnel, does much of the administrative work, organizes fundraising—the trip to nationals alone cost about $2000 per girl—and Daniels is even the squad’s new web master.

And due to budget constraints, the duo was left with the task of choreographing much of this year’s competition routine, which requires much more effort than you might imagine.

“I’d say this year was the only year we’ve researched in terms of choreography,” Daniels says. “This year we actually watched lots of videos from other competitions and really adopted some of the elements we liked from other routines. A lot of the choreography was original, but some of the more technical aspects—the formations and things—were borrowed.”

No one can argue with the final results, though.