Their friendship started in fourth grade when they had no idea they were neighbors. Now, about seven years later, these two girls are like two peas in a pod.

Kaelynn Leick and Aurora Pompeo are both seniors at Tahoma High School and have been dancing together since they met.

According to Pompeo, Leick got her into dancing when they were very young. They both said they started in ballet, but wanted to do something that involved more competition.

In middle school, they said there was a dance community at their school with a lot of girls trying out for the middle school dance team. In high school, dance is not as popular according to Pompeo and Leick.

When the girls first started high school, that was the first year Tahoma was letting freshmen join the dance team and they said the coaches were afraid too many freshmen would show up, but only four freshmen tried out.

Pompeo said it was kind of hard to start off with, but it got better as time went on and now they are the captains of the team.

With the responsibility of captains, they are in charge of coming up with dance routines for tryouts and leading their team to victories. They were able to come up with a few dance routines when they competed in state last year.

According to Pompeo, with all that going on and being a senior in high school, life can be very stressful.

“I would agree that it is mainly time management, it’s not even the amount of time it takes, it’s balancing your time because you could have a lot of homework one night but you gotta stay at dance until 5:30 p.m.,” Leick said.

Both girls have AP certificates, so they are taking very hard classes on top of being dancers. And with college applications to do, they are discovering just how important it is to make time for little things they never thought they would have to think about.

For instance, Pompeo said “It’s just a lot of making sure you’re getting enough sleep and eating enough.”

As far as competing goes, Pompeo said they do well, since last year they only had six girls on the team.

Tahoma is a 4A school, meaning they have a lot of students. So when their dance team goes to state they compete against other 4A teams and according to Pompeo those teams are huge.

“We have to think about teams like Kentridge. They have 60 girls dancing at one time and we have to follow up with six girls and the bias is crazy when it comes to showmanship,” Pompeo said. “Everyone is smiling and showing really well, but if one person out of six drops their smile, it’s far more noticeable than 60.”

According to Leick, the judges expect them to be a very large team and maybe have about 30 dancers, but their team is very small in comparison.

Since their team is so small, the fact they came in at 13 out of 17 in state last year was major accomplishment for the team according to Leick.

Part of the reason the girls think not very many people want to join the team is because it looks too easy, since when they perform in front of their school it is at football games. According to Leick, they do their harder routines in state.

“For a while no one really wanted to join the dance team and then it slowly started to die down,” Leick said. “A lot of times people think what we do is easy, but that’s not what we do. They think ‘oh I can do that, but that’s to easy.’”

This year the team had 15 girls to join the team, which is a great number according to Pompeo and Leick.

Pompeo said she thinks it helps that with the new school everyone is so spirited and wants to join in on an activity while supporting the school.

Even though the idea of moving on from high school doesn’t seem that bad right now, both girls are nervous about what awaits them after they graduate.

“I would like to dance in college, but it’s like the practical sense, I know I want to go into psycology and American Sign Language and there’s only a handful of college that will offer me an ASL degree so I’ve geared myself more towards those schools,” Leick said. “With what I want to do, it seems like I won’t be able to balance all of that.”

Pompeo said she is not sure where she would like to go to school after high school, but she does know she wants to go into something to do with design, such as an event planner.

Another idea is to possibly become a dance coach if the timing is ever right.

“I want to coach eventually. We had a coach quit one year and we couldn’t find someone to replace her and almost were not able to continue (dancing) and I never want anyone else to have to feel that way,” Pompeo said.

Both girls said it hasn’t really hit them they are graduating, but they know it will hit them soon enough.

“I know I say I’m ready, but I know it will eventually hit me and I won’t be ready, it’s just been a long couple of years,” Leick said.

“I don’t know because I feel pretty young still, I just turned 17 and it’s really scary because I still feel like a baby.” Pompeo said.