Alana Lewis did not grow up in what she would call “a dance family,” but she did grow up with the support of a dance team that she also considers family.

Lewis was born in California, but her family moved multiple times by the time she turned six years old. Her father Corwin Lewis, a retirement home administrator, found a new job managing a facility in Burley, Idaho.

As her family settled down in this new place, the Lewises quickly realized that many of the other girls in the community who were Lewis' age were taking dance lessons at a local studio. 

Since Lewis already showed that she enjoyed dancing around the Lewis home, it became it easy decision to sign her up for dance classes.

“I did take some gymnastics classes before I started dancing, and those are really fun,” Lewis said. “But I was super interested in (dance lessons) because I had always just kind of loved to dance.”

For the next eight years, her life in that small Idaho town revolved around her spending time with her new dance friends at that studio. She would find out how important all those people were to her when she ended up moving again right before the start of her freshman year of high school.

Her dad found another job, this time managing an entire market of retirement facilities for Emerald Healthcare in Kansas City.

Lewis, the Capitol Federal® True Blue® Student of the Week, needed to do a little bit of searching after her move to Kansas, but ultimately she did find her new dance family.

Lewis said the hardest part of the move was saying goodbye to everybody from the dance studio. She described her fellow dancers as her best friends and the dance studio director as “a second mom” and the studio itself as “my second home.”

“I had spent so much time at that dance studio and it had become such an important part of my life,” Lewis said. “That was honestly the hardest part about moving from Idaho to Kansas. I was really sad to leave them.” 

Lewis initially had difficulty replicating that in Kansas City. She started looking around for studios in the area, giving many of them a try. But she had difficulty finding ones that matched her checklist.
 

“I had gone to like classes at almost every studio in the area, just trying to find one that would work best for me,” Lewis said. 

One key aspect for Lewis was that she considers her religious lifestyle very important to her. She needed a studio that would not have dance activities on Sundays and would allow her to wear more modest attire.

“That was kind of hard for me to find,” she said. “We went to a bunch of different studios trying to find something. Then I ended up at a ballet conservatory.”

Lewis spent a year taking ballet classes there, eventually starting to feel like she fit in and had a similar connection that she had with her old dance studio.

“Those girls were so sweet,” she said. “I had a place there and people started to get to know me, which became a lot easier to be at that place when it happened. But I was still missing the dance portion of that.”

Lewis said that not finding another dance studio which could provide that sense of community could have led her to give up dance altogether.

“I think that was really the point where I had to decide, ‘OK, is dance worth it for me,’” she said. “When I thought about it, I decided yes, it’s 110% worth it for me because Iove to dance. Regardless of the social side, I just love to dance and that’s what I want to keep doing.”

So Lewis altered her thinking about, viewing each studio as a choice between different styles of dance education. She said she still gravitated toward studios where the people there felt like they were kind and welcoming.

While still getting the feel for different studios in the area, Lewis tried out for the Blue Valley Southwest dance team as a sophomore. Lewis missed the opportunity to join as freshman since she and her family were still living in Idaho at the time of that year’s tryouts.

Not only did Lewis make the team, she also found what she had been missing.

“I absolutely loved it,” Lewis said. “I made a bunch of friends, I loved the coaches. The whole team environment was amazing. That became my new dance thing and I decided to focus on the dance team.”

Lewis continued to take classes at various dance studios, but none were able to offer her the same connection that she found competing alongside her high school classmates.

“At the studios, a lot of those girls grew up dancing there,” she said. “It was harder to feel like I fit in as well.”

Heading into this season, Blue Valley Southwest Glitter Girls dance coach Jaymes Dickinson and the rest of the coaching staff had selected a special role for Lewis: the team bonding captain, or unity captain.

Lewis gave her coaches credit for finding roles that fit certain members of the team, including for herself.
 

“I felt like that was really reflective of what I had kind of already been doing,” Lewis said. “I loved that they had given me that role and I was super excited about it.

“My focus as the a team unity captain is helping the girls feel like they're unified as a team and we're unified in our goal to reach our state championship, and nationals and all of these different goals. But also that they’re enjoying it as we go because I want every single girl on this team to feel like they belong as part of our community.”

Lewis said her drive to make sure everybody on the team felt included and enjoyed the process was already something she tried to do during her first year on the team. She said that focus definitely stemmed from her search from connection in the KC dance community when she arrived three years ago.

“My move helped a ton with my perception of people and just of unity in general,” she said. “I've talked to a lot of people about how the move changed me as a person where you're forced out of your comfort zone a lot when you're moving. You kind of have to learn how to step outside your comfort zone and branch out, get to know new people. Be okay with being the new person and not knowing anyone because a lot of times I can be really uncomfortable. 

“Everybody's so nice, but you're kind of left out just by nature of not knowing anybody. So it's up to you to get to know people and be willing to reach out and kind of pull yourself into conversations and stuff like that.”

In her new role this year, Lewis helps minimize or eliminate the anxiety that she knows she felt as the new person standing on the outside trying to find a way into the group, especially one that’s largely made up of people who have been friends dancing together since their preschool years.

“I think I recognized so much better the people who are standing on the outside,” Lewis said. “When you're standing on the outside of conversations, then you can see the people who feel like they're being left out. That completely switched my perspective. 

“In Idaho. I had lifelong friends who I had grown up with and I had never really worried about that. But moving, I recognized that there are a lot of moments where I could pull people into a conversation or I could pull them into an activity where a group is doing something.”

Lewis tried to make sure that this team did not fall into the same traps that others do, such as letting small cliques form within the group, often leaving other team members isolated.

“We really just made it known that if you have any struggles or are just feeling left out or anything that you can like come and talk to me, or come and talk to my other unity captain and so that we can be there for them,” she said. “Then we would plan activities after football games where we would all go out to eat together afterwards and just get to spend time together. That was really fun to get to know the team outside of dance team as well, where we all are really good friends.”
 

Lewis found her new dance family, and probably at the best possible time. She joined a team that had finished as the state runner-up at the KSHSAA Gameday Dance Showcase in each of the two previous seasons, but was right to finally break through.

Blue Valley Southwest won the 5A state championship each of the past two years at the KSHSAA Gameday Dance Showcase.

Lewis gave credit for the team’s ability to breakthrough for the program’s first state title to last year’s seniors on the team. She said they held a meeting with the entire team at the beginning of the season to decide on the team’s goals, setting the stage for the team’s championship run.

“The No. 1 thing that everybody said was, 'We want to win state,’” Lewis said.

With every member on the team knowing that this was the explicit goal, it became easier for the team to set clear expectations and push themselves and each other toward getting the job done.

To achieve that goal, the first step was scheduling what Lewis describes as “tons of morning practices.”

“We had so much motivation we would cheer each other on at every single practice and even though it was exhausting to constantly be running it full out, we just kept pushing through because that was the goal that we had,” she said. 

The hard work paid off. The Timberwolves reached the finals for the third straight year, having previously finished as the state 5-4A runner-up behind Mill Valley in each of the first two years of the competition.

Things changed in 2022, and not just with the team competing in 5A thanks to an additional classification added to the event. Mill Valley moved up to 6A that season.

Blue Valley Southwest finished the opening rounds with the third best score, only for the Timberwolves to deliver a 95.47 in the finals. Blue Valley Southwest clinched the team’s first state title with more than a seven-point advantage over runner-up Topeka Seaman.

The Timberwolves returned this year to finish both rounds with the best score, although the team finished the finals with just a two-point lead over Seaman this time.

“Every single one of us decided we needed to keep this going,” Lewis said. “We need to keep up the energy and the determination to win. 

“It continues to be hard, it doesn’t get easier. I think it's really just about the mindset of ‘we're there, we're staying there and we're not willing to bring down our standards or expectations.’”
 

Now the team has turned its attention to the National Dance Alliance High School Nationals, which is scheduled for March 8-10 in Orlando, Florida.

At last year’s competition, the team took third in Pom for large varsity schools. This year, Lewis thinks the team might end up being stronger in the Jazz or Game Day competitions. The team finished 11th in the prelims for Jazz last year, before their endurance showed through as the team shot up to a fourth-place finish in the finals.

The team will have the goal of repeating last year’s success by delivering another top-three performance. But the team’s main goal for nationals is really to make the most of their opportunity to go up on stage.

“Last year, we did really well and even if we didn’t win, we felt so good about it,” Lewis said. “We would tell each other before we went on stage, ‘Leave it all out on the stage and don’t have any regrets afterwards.’ That was our motivation going into it. Our mindset was we didn’t want to come off the stage feeling like we didn't give it our all.”

After spending her first couple years in Kansas City seeking out connection and a community, Lewis has finally started to use her support system to find herself as well. Lewis has learned early on in high school that she wants to pursue business as a career.

Her first introduction to that new passion started close to home. When the Lewises moved to Kansas City, Lewis finally became interested in her dad’s job for basically the first time. 

“I hadn't really focused on his job when I was younger. It didn’t have as big of an impact on me,” she said. “But as I've gotten older, especially with the move and just getting to hear more about his work and why we were moving, I became much more knowledgeable about what he was doing and what his job was.”

Lewis said she got to visit her dad’s workplaces and interact with people at those retirement facilities.

“That’s something I'm really passionate about, being able to just help the community and benefit the community through my work,” she said. “ That was something that I recognized that what he was doing was benefiting the community and it was really positive. Not just for his business, but also for all of those who were in the community.”

Lewis said she also quickly gravitated toward the business aspects.
 

“I've always loved to give presentations, interact with people and just think on a deeper level of solving problems,” Lewis said. 

She said the business aspects also interested her because the medical aspects did not.

“Anything to do with science is not my strong suit,” she said.

As her actual family helped give her the experiences to recognize business as the planned direction for her future career, it was her new dance family that ultimately helped her gain much more hands-on experience in the business world.
 

Glitter Girls teammate Aoife Peterson introduced Lewis to The Den, a student-run store at Blue Valley Southwest.

“I’d seen people working the store and I wondered what they’re doing, how they got into that,” Lewis said.

Lucky for Lewis, Peterson became the CEO of the Den this year.

“She mentioned to me that she thinks I would be good at that because I loved business and I had done BPA.”

Once her business teacher recommended that she should join the store, Lewis decided to give it a try. Now she gets the chance to help run the store at different times, including during basketball games and various events.

Lewis said she enjoys getting to apply all the lessons she’s learned from business classes and clubs to a functioning enterprise in the real world.

“We’re working with real money and real numbers, tracking all of our income and expenses,” she said. “I’ve also gotten to look into how they design all their different gear and really just see all of what goes into a business.”

In addition to BPA, Lewis has also joined the school’s nascent Model UN club. She’s a member of the National Honor Society, Math National Honor Society and the Wolfpack Crew, a leadership group at the school.