In the University’s 21st year of participating in Dance Marathon, the main ZiggyThon event went from 32 hours to 24 hours long as a way to encourage more people to sign up to dance.
Austin Flores, director of Dance Marathon this year, said there was a definite increase in signups since the number of hours to dance was decreased.
“We saw an increase of about 105 dancers. I think that they’ll be happy to see the total at the end,” Flores said.
Flores said there were about 410 dancers and 150 leadership team members, which put them at 560 participants. There were also 150 bikers and Flores said that there were an estimated 1,500 people at the closing ceremony.
Hazardous weather and road conditions prevented the bikers from riding the last stretch to the University. The bikers still made it to Bowling Green by bus and biked through the city to the Perry Field House to participate in the closing ceremony, where it was revealed that the participants had raised $452,251.41 throughout the total fundraising period, an increase from the $341,749.34 raised during Dance Marathon in 2015.
When it came to signing up earlier versus later, Flores said there were definitely more early sign ups than later sign ups.
“We had a lot of early signups. I think that we had some good fundraising pushes at the end to get people qualified to be able to dance, but it’s been mostly throughout the year. There’s always a push in second semester,” Flores said.
When it comes to the dancers, many of them said it wouldn’t have mattered how many hours they were dancing as long as they were doing something to help the kids this year.
Sophomore Emily Legan, who was a dancer last year, said the change in hours didn’t affect her decision to sign up again this year.
“It didn’t make any bit of a difference to me,” Legan said. “It was all for the kids. It doesn’t matter if I’m dancing five, 25 or 47 hours. As long as it’s for the kids, I’ll be here.”
Junior Megan Stahl, who was a first-time dancer this year, agreed with Legan, saying it didn’t matter how many hours since it’s for the kids. She didn’t let the change in the hours affect her decision to sign up to dance.
“I had no idea they did the 32 hours last year, so learning about it this year and only having to do it for 24 hours, it felt relieving,” Stahl said. “But either way I definitely would have done it.”
