No matter how long you have been dancing, or what level you are, we all started as beginner line dancers. If you haven’t yet tried line dancing, this article will (hopefully) persuade you to connect with a group of line dancers. First, I must pay homage to the late David Goodman, who created the Facebook page Ohio Line Dancing. After David’s untimely death in April 2023, his widow continued this page. It is a public group where anyone can search for anything to do with line dancing in the state of Ohio! You can post what (or who) you are looking for; such as a class (or instructor) or event or even a place to go line dancing near you.
In Medina, the Thirsty Cowboy’s line dance instructor, Patti, is super grateful to Kim for starting the Facebook page “Thirsty Cowboy Line Dancers and Friends” back in December 2013. Patti said that page is huge for getting information out and people in. Patti started her YouTube page when she began teaching there in 2022. Patti has posted every dance that she has taught there so that new people can easily look up anything that they want to learn and have the same dance that they do at Thirsty. Patti also puts stars in front of the title to indicate the difficulty, which makes it easy for newcomers to find the beginner dances. When new people walk into Thirsty, Patti tries to help them learn the easier dances on the floor and explains to them that after learning 3-5 dances, it just gets easier. Dances are basically the same steps in a different order. The goal is always to get people to learn the love of dance because it makes people happy! Patti ended our conversation by saying: “If someone comes in for the first time and I didn’t teach them a dance, I failed at my personal goal.” Now you see why Patti is LOVED by the Thirsty and her students!
Another Facebook group is the Jewels Dancers, started by Jonathan Booth just over a year ago. He started this group because in recent years, for various reasons, they had been losing the numbers of line dancers at Jewels Dance Hall in Austinburg. The idea was to build an “army of dancers” so no one is ever alone on the dance floor. Not everyone knows everybody, but just because you don’t know them doesn’t mean there aren’t other dancers present. This was to help bring to light the amount of people that actually do come to Jewels to dance. The more dancers, the more active the dance floor is, the better the Jewels Dance Hall experience.
Jonathan’s other goal was to have a traveling line dance team to go to other locations and events and showcase their line dancing and help attract other people to come and learn, which brings it back to their initial cause of building up the activity on the dance floor during both live band and DJ nights. As for approaching new dancers, everyone has an equal part in welcoming anyone trying to learn and anyone who is consistently participating. The Jewels Dancers invite new dancers to come to lessons with Dee Blansett on Wednesdays at Jewels and to join the group on their promotional outings. Jonathan is most proud of the amount of positive energy some of the dancers have in their efforts. He said you cannot make people do things, but they all participate when they can. They have had some pretty awesome turnouts for some of their outings; they’ve been to Cleveland for the Country Bar Crawl. They danced in the street at the Geauga County Maple Festival, and danced at both the Lake County and Geauga County Fairs. They have also befriended other line dance groups. They even had a pretty good-sized group make a trip to Nashville! The group page now has 300 members on it, and they have a solid 40+ dancers who regularly participate. People who weren’t friends a year ago, have developed very good and solid relationships and friendships. Jonathan believes that “line dancing is life changing” and it seems that his group has definitely changed lives for the better!
If you have never line danced, do yourself a favor and look up these groups on Facebook; we all started as beginner line dancers and any one of them would be happy to welcome you!
