Park City Miners and Special Olympics Mountaineers team up for first Unified DanceSport championship

Special Olympics of Utah (SOUT) hosted an event for DanceSport at which the Park City team competed. Photo: TownLift // Michele Roepke

MURRAY, Utah — When Cindy Gottschall hit a moonwalk on stage Saturday at Cottonwood High School, the crowd erupted. It was one of many highlights at the Unified DanceSport Championships, where Special Olympics athletes and high school students train and perform together as one team.

The Park City Mountaineers, a Special Olympics of Utah multi-sport team, partnered with the Park City High School Miners Dance Team for the event — the first time the two programs have collaborated at a championship level since a brief Unified basketball effort years ago.

DanceSport is one of the newest additions to Special Olympics of Utah’s lineup, and for many of the Mountaineers, Saturday was their introduction to it.

I want to give credit to Christa and Izzy for all they’ve done to tell us about DanceSport, because it’s so new I hadn’t ever even heard of it,” Gottschall told TownLift.

The Christa she’s referring to is Christa Anderson, who coaches the Miners Dance Team at PCHS and took on the role of Mountaineers DanceSport coach for this partnership. The Izzy is Izzy Vogel, a PCHS senior who handled much of the choreography, music selection and costuming for the team’s routine, dubbed “Mr. Electric Blue.”

The collaboration didn’t come without its hiccups. The team’s costumes were supposed to arrive by mail before the competition, but when the shipment didn’t show, the volunteers pulled together new outfits the day before.

Anderson said none of that dampened the experience.

“The dance team is all in. This has been so fun,” she told TownLift. “We’re really excited, and if the wonderful people at SOUT decide after this first show to continue with this cool sport, we’ve all already said we’ll come back next year for this, even these student-athletes from the U.”

She credited the parents of the Special Olympics athletes as the ones who truly make it work, driving their children to practices at PCHS and giving up their afternoons to cheer from the audience.

For the high school students involved, the partnership carried its own weight. Addie Phinney, a Miners Dance Team member and graduating PCHS senior who plans to study marketing at the University of Utah, said the Unified experience added something to her dance background that years of training alone couldn’t. Vogel, also a senior headed to the U, balanced her work on the Unified team alongside her roles on the PCHS cheerleading squad and as captain of the robotics team.

Gottschall, a longtime Special Olympics of Utah athlete, works at Lucky Ones Coffee inside the Park City Library — a shop that employs and empowers individuals with disabilities — and trains at the PC MARC. For her, Saturday was a chance to try something completely new with the support of a community she’s been part of for decades.

Following the Unified competition, a traditional event was held for just the Mountaineers, who also train and compete in skiing, snowshoeing, ice skating and soccer. The Miners Dance Showcase is scheduled for May 14-15 at PCHS.

Saturday’s event suggests the renewed partnership between the two programs has staying power. Anderson and her students have already committed to returning if Special Olympics of Utah brings DanceSport back — and based on what happened at Cottonwood High School, that seems less like a question than a formality.