The Shawville 4-H club’s square dancers traveled to Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue over the weekend to put their best feet forward at the first tournament of the spring competition season, where the club took home several titles.
The club landed first place in both the junior and senior team competitions. The youngest group, the Cloverbuds, came second out of two teams.
The club also took home some individual and couple prizes. Best Cloverbud up-and-coming couple went to Grace Pasch and Florence Laframboise, and best senior couple went to Kathleen Kelly and Ben Judd.
This year’s club president, Amy Sheppard, took home best junior caller, a category of callers ranging from six to 25-years-old. This is only the second season that she’s been calling.
“[Calling] is not something I would naturally do, but as I’ve heard from quite a few people, they think that it might be my true calling,” Sheppard said. “I was named Champion Caller, and last year I was named Champion Caller as well. It was definitely a big achievement.”
Sheppard said that she hopes trying something out of her comfort zone will encourage others to do so as well.
“I think it’s something that really makes me want to work towards bettering myself and helping out the kids and really encouraging them to take on new projects like I did,” Sheppard said.
She said that all the dancers have been hard at work leading up to the weekend’s event.
“We’ve been hosting quite a few extra practices and they’ve really been working hard. It’s great to see that they have excelled at the competition.”
One of the club coaches, Tyler McCann, said that there will be two more competitions in the spring season so the dancers will have to continue working hard.
“The competition was tough and they beat some really good teams this weekend. The question will be, how do they keep stepping up their game all year long and stay on top. It’ll be hard,” McCann said.
“Our teams have really clicked this year, the dancers are dancing together really well. They’ve all taken it really seriously but I think had a lot of fun at the same time.”
