Tom Cascella

Nobody beats the Towson University Dance Team. Nobody. With 10 Division 1 national championships in a row, the Maryland-based team seems unstoppable. Its secret weapon? Mild-mannered, middle-aged theater designer and costumer Tom Cascella. “It’s very difficult to be an old, fat man like me and coach 30 18 to 21-year-old young ladies,” says Cascella. Yet since the theater professor took over the team in 1992, when it was part of the marching band, he has become a pro in the competitive dance world. Tragedy led Cascella to success. His daughter Kimberly died in 1992 when she was just a toddler. A wise colleague, the late Dorothy Segal, then dean of students, suggested Cascella might find solace by working with a campus women’s group. He agreed to become dance team sponsor, though he had never taken a dance class in his life. “I learned as I went,” he says. And he followed Segal’s advice: “Don’t do anything that endangers their safety or welfare or embarrasses them or the university. Besides that, you can do anything you want. You’re their coach.” Early in his tenure Cascella dropped the team’s original name, the Towson Tigerettes. “I thought it was sexist, like they were pets on the sideline cheering on the boys’ teams,” he says.

That first year, just one girl auditioned. Cascella made her captain. “It took me a long time to learn music, choreography and the ins and outs of dance team coaching,” he says. Much of his on-the-job training came from his own team members. He continues to work with Towson dance team graduates Laura Blank and Bridie Schellenberg, both trained dancers and teachers, who act as assistant coaches. But he also took workshops on coaching women and encouraging them in competitive environments and attended summer programs for dance teams. “It’s still a struggle,” he says. “I tell people the dance team practices a couple of times a week, but I practice every day.” Cascella spends about 40 hours a week teaching his theater department courses. Another 20 hours goes to coaching, thinking about dance team ideas and needs and tackling tasks ranging from finding and editing new music to dying the team’s shoes in his kitchen sink.

These days, 100 or more dancers from Maryland and beyond flock to auditions, and the team is known for its dedication, camaraderie, outstanding choreography and performance. “Not only is he motivating, but Tom is one of the most supportive coaches I have ever met,” says Taylor Walker, 24, an alum who now captains the New Jersey Nets dance team. “He makes sure the team is fully prepared.”

Choreographic collaboration is one reason the Towson team succeeds, Cascella says. While most collegiate teams hire a choreographer to teach routines over a week or weekend, Cascella and his team members take a month or more to complete a piece. “We all choreograph,” he says. “For competition routines, I always have a story for the routine. There’s always a through-line.” Towson’s prize-winning piece Abandon All Hope, for example, was about the battle between good and evil. “It’s not necessary for the audience or the judges to understand the story, but it’s important for us to know the story we’re telling.” They continue to refine dances, throwing out or adding details during six to 18 hours of weekly rehearsals. “Sometimes after we perform it and don’t like it,” Cascella says, “we’ll go back to the drawing board.”The team members appreciate Cascella’s devotion and tough-love approach. In rehearsal, he’s a taskmaster making them run laps, fine-tune triple pirouettes and perfect splits. But otherwise, he’s a pussycat. “He’s really tough, but he’s really loving,” says alum Samantha Zweben, 26, an actress and dancer in New York. “I would trust him with my life.”

In addition to having a devoted coach, Towson’s team benefits from being housed in the university’s theater department, where Cascella teaches set, costume and lighting design. “In the theater department there’s respect for artistic vision,” he says. “We’re not just waving our pom-poms for the boys who make a basket. Our dancers are artist-dancers. They don’t come from high school spirit programs but from competitive dance programs.” That gives them a deeper connection to the arts. “A lot of our kids say, ‘We perform at basketball games? Why?’ They’ve never danced at a sporting event before.”

Most Towson Dance Team members major in business, education, nursing and communications, and they don’t see dance as a career path (though Zweben appeared in the movie Step Up II and Walker continues to dance). But Vincent Thomas, a choreographer and professor in Towson’s dance department who occasionally gives the group feedback, expresses admiration for the team’s professionalism. “There’s a rigor that dance teams have that is sometimes missing in concert dance. A lot of Towson’s success comes from Tom because he pulls together the team. The training is very intense.”Cascella is now among the most senior coaches on the competitive college dance team circuit. He gets attached to his charges, seeing in them glimmers of his daughter Kimberly. As one of his team members said to him early on, “Tom, I know you lost Kimberly, but now you have 18 other daughters.”
 
 

Lisa Traiger, former co-president of the Dance Critics Association, writes about the performing arts from Rockville, Maryland.
 
Photo courtesy of Tom Cascella