"I strongly suspect - and have seen no reason to believe otherwise - that the judges whom you claim to be desirable as coaches are so desirable not because of their dancing expertise but because they can affect the outcome of a competition."

You "have seen no reason to believe otherwise" only because you continue to ignore what has been said here, which is that these coaches are popular as coaches even with dancers who do not expect to be judged by them any time in the near future. Thus the only way they can affect the outcome is by improving the dancing - which is after all why we take coaching.

"I know for a fact that judges in pro/am competitions have told competitors to use certain teachers if they want better scores."

First, you can not ignore the legitimate side of that: better guidance generally will result in better performance, if the dancers implement that guidance.

But more importantly, the primary subject of my comments is not pro/am competitions, but professional and amateur ones. There are major differences, and it's well known that pro-am is in many cases as much or more about the money as it is about the dancing. It's actually been admitted in the official communication of various dance organizations that pro/am is ultimately treated as "dance school business" rather than a form of competition. If you look at the rulebooks, a number of key fairness rules and procedures officially apply only to the professional and championship amateur divisions - in other words, the only divisions that the organization is really worried about the competitive legitimacy of.

You have offered nothing but insubstantial generalizations about coaching and dancing.

You claim that the best dancers (I suppose meaning those with the highest scores in competition) all owe their success to using "high-level" coaching.

I suspect that the true reason for their success is the fact that these same folks have more time to spend on the floor and are able to practice more than most amateurs can afford to do.

Of course, nothing is going to change your mind and I don't care. I want readers on this forum - especially new ones - to understand that the advice that you give is prejudiced by your own narrow - and elitist - view of Ballroom.

You complain that I ignore statements that you make in your posts. You're correct; I do so because you have no real credibility.

I have willingly disclosed facts about my own experiences and background in ballroom because anyone reading my posts deserves to know the framework within which I approach dancing. Many other posters do the same.

You, on the other hand, continually throw up silly reasons for not being forthcoming about your own background, claiming that the particulars of your experience are not relevant to the discussion at hand.

What possible reason could you have for refusing to tell us whether or not you have an amateur partner? That fact is important because preparing with an amateur partner is entirely different than preparing with a professional. And yes, I have done both.

Perhaps I just have more respect for people than you do.



jj

"You claim that the best dancers (I suppose meaning those with the highest scores in competition) all owe their success to using "high-level" coaching."

No, that is not my claim. My claim is that they all use it as one of the tools to achieve success. They would be fools not to.

"I suspect that the true reason for their success is the fact that these same folks have more time to spend on the floor and are able to practice more than most amateurs can afford to do."

Both are factors. Your mistake is in thinking that hard work explain it all - it doesn't. You need the best guidance as well. Good guidance can save you years of wasting work in the wrong direction. You will still have to work hard, but you will be working on the the right things.

You've also noticed that the advanced amateurs are closer to professional in their habits than most amateurs. Professionals in any field do not waste their time with consumer grade tools when it is not cost effective to do so. They buy professional grade tools when their greater cost is justified. Paying twice the normal lesson rate to occasional work with the best coaches in the world is in many cases a very sound investment in the right tools for the job.

If I thought that hard work alone would make my partner and me a better dancer then I wouldn't use a professional at all.

While extensive practice may not be sufficient to produce good dancing, it is absolutely necessary. Spending money is no substitute for time on the floor.

You keep insisting that, without the "guidance" of these top level coaches, practice is counterproductive. That statement makes me wonder how much you actually practice, if at all.

The nature of ballroom is such that, beyond a certain basic level (at which using expensive coaches would be stupid), even amateur dancers know when something is not right.

This is the point in this exchange when your lack of experience with an amateur partner betrays you. Even with their teacher's help, a couple needs to work on figures and routines until they understand in their physicality what they must do. It seems pretty apparent to me that you do not do so.

My partner and I have corrected several issues by ourselves and we always have our progress confirmed by our coach.

Perhaps, some day when you have a litle more confidence in your dancing, you'll find the courage to share with the others on this board as much as they've shared with you.

I doubt it.



jj

"If I thought that hard work alone would make my partner and me a better dancer then I wouldn't use a professional at all."

But why does the same logic not extend to the quality of the professional?

For some kinds of things, the leading experts are easily twice as cost effective as garden variety professionals. For other things, you may simply need an outside perspective requiring hardly any dance expertise.

"Spending money is no substitute for time on the floor."

I never said it was.

Spending money can, however, help you make the switch from practicing something in the wrong (or suboptimal) way to practicing in in the right (or at least more optimal) one.

"You keep insisting that, without the "guidance" of these top level coaches, practice is counterproductive."

No, you keep making up things to argue against which I never said.

"The nature of ballroom is such that, beyond a certain basic level (at which using expensive coaches would be stupid), even amateur dancers know when something is not right."

There's a difference between knowing that the overall effect is not right, and knowing what is wrong with enough specificity to productively fix it. That's where the experts come in. (This also points out the mistake in the common habit of putting beginners with less skilled teachers - once the beginners are ready to take things seriously, they can benefit from expert coaches as much as anyone)

All you have to do is look at average non-finalist professional competitors to see what happens when dancers practice hard without sufficient expert guidance to find solutions to their real problem. What you see there is dancing that is highly rehearsed, but very inefficient. If they really want to improve, they are going to need better guidance in addition to heavy practice.

"This is the point in this exchange when your lack of experience with an amateur partner"

Still retreating to personal attacks based on UNFOUNDED ASSUMPTIONS whenever you run out of arguments of substance...

this foolishness is at an end.


Baloney. What you see is both younger, less experienced couples and a few older couples whose skills are beginning to fade but who are not capable of maintaining their lifestyle through teaching, disregarding the fact that they will soon have no choice. This is the type of competitor who often becomes a pro/am coach.

In those instances in which you do see poor coaching play a role, it generally involves those situations where a naturally skilled but penurious young couple is laboring under a lack of coaching time moreso than coaching quality.

The only thing that they really gain from hiring the judge to "coach" them is familiarity.

Your causality is wrong.

More to the point, I bascially eliminated virtually all of your objections in another post in this thread. I'll let you enjoy it.



jj

jofjonesboro.
The couple I was refering to is a professional competitor. There are many Amatures who will be having lessons from those who are judging there events. This will be with the full blessing of there regular coaches. In fact the coaches are in the main the orchestrators of this. We have a major competition in a couple of weeks time part of which is the World Latin Amateur Championship. This will reach your tv screens at some time or other. I believe we will be seeing it on Xmas day. We will see the whole show and not just the World Latin.
To get back to the judging bit. It is impossible for us as humans not to recognise somebody we know or have met. If we didn't have this natural ability we wouldn't recognise any of our family. Every time we meet them it would be like the first time. So if you have had recent lessons from one of the judges or more, your chances of being seen are better than one who hasn't.

Require each judge before every heat to declare his or her relationship to any of the couples being judged.

This would take less than a minute (unless you have a seriously f-cked up situation) before each heat and would invite the appropriate level of public scrutiny of each judge's scoring.

After half a day or so of competition, any judge consistently giving high scores to his own clients might legitimately have his qualifications reviewed. No competition, professional or amateur, would want a reputation of hiring judges with questionable records.

When you consider the matter, there would be no supportable reason for any judge to decline to make such an announcement and increased oublic awareness can only be good.

Saying ". . . there will be many Amatures (sic) . . . ." is pretty vague.

Of course their coaches would support such a system if it benefits them. They want to be able to tout their "success rate" to prospective new students.

The problem in this situation is that the results are claimed to be proof that taking lessons from these judges has made the couples better dancers when it is not just as but even more likely that the judges are simply rewarding their clients.

Can you name the competition in question?



jj

"Require each judge before every heat to declare his or her relationship to any of the couples being judged."

Going back how far?

"This would take less than a minute"

No, it would take quite a while with 5 or more judges and a 40 or more couple first round, and questionable memories, and inevitable confusion.

"After half a day or so of competition, any judge consistently giving high scores to his own clients"

Sounds like you are talking about pro/am with its huge numbers of entries per dancer... in ordinary professional or amateur competitions, there's only one opportunity to place a given couple - and that's if they make the final (well, two if they are eligible for rising star or some other secondary division, but that's probably on a different day). Otherwise all a judge really gets to say is that a couple is in the top 50% of the current round.

"When you consider the matter, there would be no supportable reason for any judge to decline to make such an announcement"

Except for it being largely impractical in the real world.

"The problem in this situation is that the results are claimed to be proof that taking lessons from these jdges has made the couples better dancers when it is not just as but even more likely that the judges are simply rewarding their clients."

You seem to be forgetting that the results don't really change at competitions where their coaches are not judging.

You also forget that you need to convince the majority of the judges in order to get a placement. If a couple deserves 6th and their coach outrageously marks them first, it's unlikely they will get any better than 5th (and probably they will get 6th), meanwhile that outlying mark that accomplished nothing IS going to raise a lot of questions.

Your entire argument against this suggestion is that it would take too much time. Because such a thing has not been done, you have no background on which to base such a claim.

You also have provided no logical reason to believe that this policy would be impractical.

I did not say "round"; I said "heat," meaning - with a few exceptions - eight to ten couples.

Once the couples have taken the floor, the MC would ask the question "Has any judge accepted any fees from a couple on the floor?" Each judge in turn would then call out the number of each couple who had done so. That entire exercise would barely take a minute even if every judge in the panel had accepted fees from every couple.


In another post, you made this claim:

Now, suddenly everyone forgets who is working with whom? Even the judges themselves?

People tend to remember things that matter. If this policy becomes a rule and both competitors and judges know that there would be consequences for faulty disclosure, they will remember.


You are trying to obfuscate the issue here. A judge could very well - and in your world, probably would - have several client couples in the competition. Even if he judges each of them only once, his scores for different couples over a series of heats would still establish a pattern if he is not basing those scores on performance.


I'm not forgetting anything because I have never known that claim to be true and I still don't.


The basic principle behind my proposal holds true for one judge or several. You have already said that there are amateurs who take coaching from judges. There's nothing to keep those who can afford it from taking such lessons from several different judges over the course of a year.

I've seen several of the same judges at every competition which I've attended. Were I so inclined, I could buy "coaching" from all of them.

It's genuinely fun to imagine a scenario under my proposal in which every judge in a panel called out the same number. If that couple received first place, the raising of eyebrows among everyone in the hall would create a breeze.


This is your only legitimate point. I'd say one year. Judges, being human (at least according to Polished), are susceptible to the "What have you done for me lately?" syndrome.

Your only objection to my idea is based on nothing more than supposition.

The more I think about this matter, the more than I realize that it would work - and work well.



jj