By Jeffrey Cohen | Sports Writer
Baylor Country Dance Club could feel the heat of competition the moment it walked into its second Hardwood Classic on Saturday.
“We realized that there was a certain tension in the air,” said Lorena senior Riley Boozer, the club’s vice president of marketing. “A lot of the other clubs … didn’t have a high energy.”
Instead of submitting to the tension, the Bears saw an opportunity to stand above the rest.
“Me and a couple of the officers were like, ‘We’re going to make sure that we’re hype,’ and we started getting our members hyped up,’” Boozer said.
With most of them going to their first competition, Boozer and the other officers saw that the newcomers started off dancing stiff, but Baylor’s energy helped them loosen up as the competition progressed.
“Their nerves were definitely high, but the second that we started having fun with it … they really let loose, and they performed great,” Boozer said.
It came down to Baylor and reigning champion North Texas after a successful day of country dancing.
“There was a big tension, like, ‘Who’s going to win? Baylor or UNT?’” Boozer said. “They elongated the announcement for who’s going to be in second place because everyone knew that it was either Baylor or UNT. And then UNT gets announced, and we’re all like, ‘No way.’”
Saturday’s energy-filled victory marked the first title for Baylor Country Dance Club. The team competed against eight Texas schools in its second Hardwood Classic competition.
While Baylor’s energy was meant to uplift its members, it also ignited under competition with Texas A&M. The revival of the Battle of the Brazos brought out the Aggies’ arsenal of chants and the Bears’ popular slogan.
“We were cheering each other on as well as really getting hyped because A&M was right next to us, and they started doing their chants that they do at football games and we wanted to be louder,” said San Antonio senior Arin Ury, the club’s president. “We just kept doing the ‘Sic ’em Bears’ over and over again.”
The fight of “whoops” and “Sic ‘ems” was not short-lived. The competition lasted nine hours, from noon to 9 p.m., with only an hour break for dinner.
The Hardwood Classic consisted of five different competitions with multiple events apiece. Unlike some other contests, this one also included preliminary and finals rounds for each event.
“There’s prelims, where everyone gets to compete, and then there is the finals, which is a select few,” Boozer said. “We had a very high success rate on getting people prepared for competition and getting them into the finals.”
Baylor accounted for five of 14 finalists in Jack and Jill progressive, which is where individuals are randomly paired with other dancers. It also brought in four of 14 finalists for the steals competition, where a lead will take a follow from another dancer and are partly judged for their “steal” and not just their dancing. Five Bears also made it to the final round in line dancing.
After showing out for hours, it was time to receive the individual and team awards. The announcements went Baylor’s way from the start.
“They started out giving awards to line dance and in beginner line dance we had a clean sweep,” Boozer said. “Whenever Laurel [Carter] was announced as first place, you could hear a pin drop for about half a second and then the Baylor team was just going crazy. That set the bar for how we were cheering for everyone else.”
Baylor knocked off North Texas, who had won every year of the young contest — including last year, when the Bears finished second.
“They won five times in a row, and last year we came in second,” Ury said. “This time we locked in, and we got about 15 people to come, which was super exciting because we were so close to beating UNT last time and they had 20–something people and four people almost beat them.”
Baylor put on an impressive performance in 2025. There were only four Bears in attendance due to the competition taking place on Easter weekend, but they still reached the podium despite bringing fewer people than the rest of the field.
“We actually got second across all the schools with only four individuals,” said Phoenix senior Sam Brown, the club’s instructor coordinator. “We had some people that really did well across multiple competitions, which I think is what really pushed us to score so highly, especially compared to other organizations.”
Baylor Country Dance typically begins the academic year with around 500 to 600 total members but dwindled to about 100 to 200 as the year progressed. While the club teaches people of many levels how to line dance and partner dance, it also provides practices for the few that want to compete.
“Most of our members have never competed, didn’t even know really how a competition works,” Brown said. “I actually held a couple of practice sessions for members who are interested in just getting better to come and learn a little bit more, but then I specifically held a competition prep workshop the night before the competition.”
The Country Dance Club meets Wednesdays from 9-10 p.m. in the Barfield Drawing Room on the second floor of the Bill Daniel Student Center.
