{"id":27235,"date":"2025-08-10T17:24:39","date_gmt":"2025-08-10T23:24:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/?p=27235"},"modified":"2025-08-31T18:29:22","modified_gmt":"2025-09-01T00:29:22","slug":"heart-of-america-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/2025\/heart-of-america-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"Heart of America 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Heart of America in Kansas City was Jim and my second am-am competition. We dance cha-cha, rhumba, swing. This is our attempt.<br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/zfiysxFD1Fk?si=CglfvTYWHrzGBk_Z\" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>You may wonder: were we competing against the other people in this video? Nope. The two other am-am couples who competed in Senior Bronze Am-Am danced C1 so they aren&#8217;t in this heat.  I see a younger am dancer dancing with her pro and I see a Sr. am gentleman dancing with his pro.  You might wonder how I know which leads are ams and which pros?  Leads wear the number. If it&#8217;s higher than 300 the lead is an am. Otherwise, they are a pro. <\/p>\n<p>The gentleman wearing 367 is the current points leader in the WDSSeries Pro-Am something or other. That&#8217;s mostly a participation award. He&#8217;s at <i>all<\/i> the competitions and dances <I>everything<\/i>.  <\/p>\n<p>Lots of things are organized to facilitate &#8220;bragging&#8221; rights, provided the winners don&#8217;t reveal all. There are several &#8220;series&#8221; you can enter. The &#8220;series&#8221; that isn&#8217;t mostly a participation award is called &#8220;Best of the Best&#8221; series.  You can&#8217;t really get those just by entering a lot of competitions.  I have never won that.  But we did win the am-am championship and I have won other championships. I&#8217;ve even won when we were contested.   ( You can be placed 2nd out of 1 couple! And the judges will mark you 2 out of 1! It&#8217;s not just theoretical. ) <\/p>\n<p>Looking at it myself, I need to get &#8220;snappier&#8221;.  I&#8217;m not sure how to do that since you aren&#8217;t <i>supposed<\/i> to lift your feet and &#8220;jump&#8221;!  So you can&#8217;t get snappier that way.  I already knew my styling is deficient. If you watch Mambo, you&#8217;ll see we got off time near 5:38. We stopped and restarted in this heat. We danced &#8220;on 2&#8221; often enough the judges didn&#8217;t ding us for that. We danced on time in our other heat. <\/p>\n<p>Open thread. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Heart of America in Kansas City was Jim and my second am-am competition. We dance cha-cha, rhumba, swing. This is our attempt. You may wonder: were we competing against the other people in this video? Nope. The two other am-am couples who competed in Senior Bronze Am-Am danced C1 so they aren&#8217;t in this heat. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/2025\/heart-of-america-2025\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Heart of America 2025<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-data-comparisons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27235"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27237,"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27235\/revisions\/27237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}