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“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” — Al Pacino as Michael Corleone, “Godfather III”
Jennie Volkert’s initial Michael Corleone moment began when she graduated from Cal State Fullerton and decided to take one for the team.
“Taking one for the team,” in this instance, meant that Volkert, who planned to build on her child development degree and pursue a teaching credential, temporarily put that idea on hold to coach Cal State Fullerton’s Dance Team.
“When I was on the team, I had a different coach every year,” she said. “My last year on the team, that coach wasn’t coming back and I had a lot of friends who were still on the team and they told me, ‘You just need to do it and coach.’
“I was like, ‘OK, they more or less needed another coach.’ It was interesting being a coach to your friends, but it worked. And it took off from there.”
Did it ever.
Volkert, who cheered CSUF’s last football team in 1992 as a Titan cheerleader, took one for the team in 1997 by taking over the Titans Dance Team out of necessity. At that point, the coaching carousel ceased and the success began.
Starting in 2000, Volkert and the Titans have rolled up 16 Universal Dance Association national titles. Sixteen.
The Titans’ 16 titles have come in the Jazz competition, which can’t be longer than two minutes and must feature no more than 16 dancers. Performances are judged “on choreography, technique, execution and overall effort,” according to the UDA website. It’s two minutes of showtime during Martin Luther King weekend that pretty much has 364 days, 23 hours and 58 minutes of work leading up to it.
The work starts with spring auditions, which this year, are next Tuesday. Selected women go to a couple of cheerleading camps during the summer to learn the routines for the upcoming basketball season; yes, the Dance Team performs at every Titans’ men’s and women’s basketball game. Starting in September, they practice three times a week until Christmas, when the practices are daily until the UDA Nationals in Orlando in mid-January.
Along with the practices are weight training sessions and along with the basketball performances are community events such as reading to elementary school children, the Spark of Love Toy Drive and various food drives that Volkert isn’t shy about volunteering her team for.
Like other athletic department programs, it’s a year-round endeavor. Albeit one that has gotten a bit easier for Volkert and her assistants, Kenndra Hofstetter and Krysten Dorado, both of whom are former Titan dancers and both of whom are so wedded to the program that Hofstetter still choreographs routines from her home in Idaho. Dorado records the routines, uploads the videos for Hofstetter to review and awaits the verdict.
The program’s rise, combined with the rise of social media, have made it easier for not only Volkert to recruit, but for her and her staff to know what other teams are doing.
When Volkert first took over, she researched every school district in Orange County and environs, typed up flyers and sent them to various dance studios. She’d pick up the phone and call dance studio directors, as much to build relationships as to find out if they, perhaps, had a dancer or three to send her way. She’d hit sorority houses to promote auditions and have her team hand out flyers around campus.
This began to change in 2000, when CSUF won its first national title — a feat that shocked Volkert as much as it energized her. Five years and five national titles later, Volkert noticed she was starting to get elite-level dancers who, only a few years earlier, would have gone elsewhere.
“When I took over, I think what helped was winning,” she said. “With Cal State Fullerton being a commuter campus for years, people didn’t know we had a dance team. They didn’t know we had a cheer squad. Once we got out there and we were on ESPN and we won, we were in newspapers and people were talking about us.
“I think the recognition from winning helps us become what we are. With all that, dancers — mostly local dancers — from various studios all over California started to learn, ‘Oh, they have a dance team and they’re good.’ That’s how we got our numbers up at auditions.
“If you had asked me 20 years ago what was my game plan to make this program successful, well, I didn’t have a master [plan]. I simply wanted to take over the program and help my friends by being their coach, so this program could stay on campus.”
The program isn’t going anywhere and no longer does Volkert improvise on the fly. She has the routine for creating new routines down pat. The community invites and inquiries from prospective dancers roll in faster than Volkert can process them. And support from alums and former dancers keep Volkert’s passion for what she has been doing the last 22 years on a quick beat.
“Running the program itself is not difficult — I’ve been doing it forever. I know what needs to get done and I have a great coaching staff and great dancers who are great people. That aspect is not hard,” Volkert said. “What’s hard is staying on top and the pressure of staying on top. That’s what’s been hard.
“We compete against a lot of really great teams and there’s a lot of great talent out there.”
That’s true — and it’s only getting better. The Titans finished third this year in Jazz, behind champion Utah Valley and runner-up Grand Canyon; and second in the Pom competition (behind Hofstra) at nationals. The pressure current Titan dancers face to keep the program among the nation’s elite is far beyond Volkert’s early years of the late 1990s, when she was pulled in to essentially saving the program.
That pressure is also emblematic in Volkert’s 12-year-old daughter, Brooke, a passionate dancer who Volkert said is already doing routines light years better than what her current dancers were doing at the same age.
As for Volkert’s Michael Corleone moments, well, they took care of themselves. She did get that teaching credential, along with a master’s in education and an administrative certification. She did manage to put that child development degree to use, having taught elementary school in Chino Hills the past 21 years.
And by taking one for the team, she managed to save, revive and make a program thrive — a program that probably wouldn’t be what it is without her.
“It’s fun. I didn’t think I would do it this long,” she said. “But my daughter’s passion is dance; she competes as well and she loves it. That’s what helps keep me going with it. It’s fun for her to have all my girls as great role models.
“For me, I teach little ones all day, so it’s fun for me to be able to work with college girls and just to know I could be a part of their college memories and have an impact on them. That’s what’s rewarding to me.”
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