‘If you can dance, you can dance.’ How two men changed the Kentucky dance team
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- JoJo Edmonds auditioned for and made the UK dance team in 2022.
- By 2026, Edmonds and Sam Birdsong were the only two men on the 46-person roster.
- Head coach Janet Brock holds male and female dancers to the same expectations and prioritizes open communication.
JoJo Edmonds’ first dance memory isn’t a studio mirror. It’s a television.
Prior to tryouts or training, before he studied or choreographed, Lexington native Edmonds remembers sitting on the carpet as a child while his grandfather played Michael Jackson music videos.
The adults talked, his family moved around him, but Edmonds stayed put, paying rapt attention and trying his best to understand how a human body could communicate so much through movement alone.
“That’s a vivid memory,” Edmonds said. “Seeing Michael Jackson on the TV for the first time.”
Now a senior dance student at the University of Kentucky, Edmonds still thinks of dance as a form of speech. It isn’t limited to its performance or even to its performer. Instead, it’s a transfer. A look from someone in the crowd. A shared moment of understanding and connection between audience and dancer.
“I just fell in love with the idea of like, ‘OK, I don’t even have to speak when I get offstage,’” Edmonds said. “Because I just expressed myself.”
That’s the backbone of what makes recent “firsts” inside UK’s dance team feel bigger — and more important — than novelty. For decades, the team has had passionate dancers; a sideline constant at a school where sports are an identity. However, until Edmonds showed up to auditions in 2022, the team had only ever had female dancers.
“Being the first male on the team was kind of an afterthought,” Edmonds said. “I definitely had to grow into that title.”
Two years later, Sam Birdsong arrived from Liberty Township, Ohio, a product of Lakota East High School and Star Performance Centre with a love for technique that looks much different from Edmonds’ arena-captivating charisma.
In 2026, they remain the only two men on a 46-person roster.
‘How do you feel about this?’
Head coach Janet Brock said that history wasn’t the point four years ago — not for her or any of the people in the room who had to decide whether Edmonds belonged. Brock said no man had ever auditioned for the dance team before 2022; two tried out that year, but only Edmonds made it through.
“At the end of the day, the males are held to the same expectations as the females are,” Brock said. “They work just as hard. They show up for their teammates.”
After years playing football at Frederick Douglass High School — and not necessarily interested in what he called “the noise” that would have been made had he accepted an invitation to join the high school dance team — Edmonds’ freshman campaign at UK seemed like his own private apprenticeship, an opportunity for him to find his footing.
Though he’d made the dance team, he said he wasn’t technically on the roster at first.
Edmonds was an alternate trying to find his fit while learning a new kind of structure, one that didn’t care where he came from but demanded exactly the same from him as everybody else on the team — do the work, practice tirelessly, do it again.
For Edmonds, the biggest shift in his first-ever dance team experience wasn’t talent — his passion and years studying at Lexington Dance Factory had prepared him — it was confidence.
But Brock was prepared. She’d learned early that what you ask of a performer is never just physical. It’s personal, with so much tied up in identity and perception that comfort must take precedence in a way that many sports don’t explicitly require from the start.
A former dancer herself, Brock said that if a performer isn’t comfortable with whatever piece they’re being asked to perform, it shows in their performance. There’s hesitation. Regardless of gender, routine or venue, Brock sees an athlete’s comfort as a necessity.
“Dance is so… it’s so artistic, and it’s so personal and it’s so emotional,” Brock said. “Making sure that every dancer is comfortable in what they’re doing, it’s huge…(I)f you’re not enjoying it, then you’re not able to perform it to the best of your ability.”
Edmonds described navigating that comfort as an open line of communication, a relationship built on check-ins before conflicts can arise. Sometimes it can be as specific as a single movement, such as bending over to touch his toes. That’s where Edmonds said he tends to “draw the line,” calling it “a very vulnerable position” for him.
“I’ve run into situations with my coach where the pom dance is just too feminine,” Edmonds said. “And that just is what it is. But I let them know that, ‘Hey, I don’t feel comfortable specifically doing this thing’ as opposed to, ‘The whole dance is just feminine.’”
Having never before featured male athletes, these types of conversations were new to the UK dance team.
However, in Brock’s eyes, they’re always worth it.
The point, Edmonds said, is that he doesn’t ever feel forced to become somebody else to belong. With his college graduation fast approaching, he noted that, more often than not, the conversation usually begins with a text from Brock before rehearsal even begins.
How do you feel about this?
That question is a big reason why being “the first” never truly felt like walking into a spotlight alone.
A fuller toolbox
“Your differences don’t really make a difference,” Edmonds said. “If you can dance, you can dance, whether you’re Black, blue, green, boy, girl, that just is what it is. I’ve always loved the inclusivity. And when I started to get included by the seniors at the time and my freshman teammates at the time..., I was equal.”
Brock sees the difference the same way. She sees adding male dancers in part through the lens of what’s now possible in the program’s routines — more lifts, more group stunts, more moments where strength can act as choreography — but Brock is careful not to reduce either Edmonds or Birdsong to utility. The result, she said, is not a separate role carved out for either guy, but a fuller toolbox for the entire team.
“JoJo and Sam both have their different strengths,” Brock said. “But they’re both willing to jump in and do whatever is needed to elevate the routine.”
Where Edmonds, who studies dance and seeks to innovate and expand the art form professionally, is rooted in exploration and public declaration that reads as I’m here to learn, but also here to stay, Birdsong is quieter, a dancer who takes his time answering questions, who has always seen dance as his sport and a dance team as his natural environment and aspires to work in social media marketing.
Raised in a family of athletes, Birdsong didn’t find his sport until a neighbor invited him to shadow a class at Star Performance Centre, five minutes from his childhood home.
“Ever since then, I’ve done it,” Birdsong said.
Birdsong compared Star to an “all-star-type environment,” less recital and more performance. Trained across styles, Birdsong gravitates to what he called “anything technique,” particularly jazz and pom, where the progress is evaluative and measurable. How clean is your turn? How sharp is your jump?
“Naturally, I’ve always been a little bit better at the technique aspects of dance,” Birdsong said. “That draws me to it. But also, I just love doing technical skills, like turns and tricks and jumps and all that, so I think that makes it stand out to me.”
‘We’re all dancers’
On a dance team since middle school, being the only male dancer in the room never felt like a defining trait to Birdsong. He’s spent his whole dance life in “a mix of situations,” he said., One day he was the lone boy on a competition team, one day he’d be working alongside another. And he learned as a preteen not to treat himself as an outlier.
“It doesn’t really matter to me,” Birdsong said. “I always have just thought of it like we’re all dancers, we’re all on the same team. It doesn’t really stand out if you’re a boy or a girl.”
When a part or role required it — a novelty dance, such as a specific routine that required him to play Superman — sure, Birdsong’s gender stood out. But most of the time, he said, the spotlight went to whomever was best that day, whoever had earned it.
The mantra is easy to say. It’s harder to live, especially as a young person finding themselves at UK, where the audience is massive, and the work is constant.
Birdsong said he’d decided by his freshman year of high school that he wanted to dance in college, and he spent years on the clinic circuit. UK wasn’t his original plan, but a close friend from his studio was trying out in Lexington and encouraged him to come along.
He stood out — Brock said Birdsong “maxed out the score sheet” — and found a program that demanded much more time than he knew how to imagine as a teenager.
More than a fan
Big Blue Nation, of course, has its own reputation and pressure. Birdsong, who had no prior ties to UK, said he had heard that “UK fans can be a little crazy,” especially when it comes to basketball. But being in it, actually joining the community, he said, is different than hearing about it.
“We’re a big sports family,” Birdsong said. “But we’re not like a certain team or school type of family. So coming here and seeing…how much fun the fans have, really just transfers onto us.”
It’s a strange hybrid position of sorts, he said, because he is a proud fan of UK Athletics, and also something more.
“You’re not only — like, yes, you’re a fan,” Birdsong said. “But you’re also more than a fan. So it just feels really special to have that experience.”
Edmonds exemplifies that “more than a fan” role; Brock called him the team’s hype man. But Edmonds thinks about the relationship almost academically, intellectualizing the way a crowd answers back and the way the energy travels.
“The more I started to learn and train in it, it started to develop itself in a conversational way,” Edmonds said. “Understanding how I feel when that type of energy gets reciprocated, it gave me the platform to just be that for someone else.”
‘Someone’s always watching’
The dance team is also where Birdsong said he learned to loosen his grip on the idea that dance has to be everything to him. In high school, he said, the goal was singular: make a program, dance in college, chase the next opportunity. College didn’t lessen the work, he said, but it widened his identity.
“Growing up, I was always like, ‘Dance is my life,’” Birdsong said. “And now…our team does a great job of putting so much focus on dance, but also focusing on other things and living your life. And now I’m really inspired by my major and just seeing other things that can make me happy has been really exciting for me, too.”
The fear that keeps people from auditioning, Edmonds said — the fear of not being good enough, of not belonging, of “the noise” that kept him away in high school — isn’t a fact. You get to define what it means to you.
Through that steadiness, the visibility of one man on the UK dance team — and now two — became something sustainable. Brock said she’s positive there has been pushback somewhere, but she hasn’t, and won’t ever, pay it much mind. Her focus remains on what the dancers put into their routines and what they represent when they step onto a floor in a Kentucky uniform: effort, talent, passion and the truth that dance has space for all who are willing to commit to it.
“Someone’s always watching,” Brock said. “It might be a grandma, grandpa…or a little boy who has dreams of dancing and doesn’t know the avenue to take to get there.”
Birdsong said that if a young boy asked him what to do with the dream of wanting to dance, his answer would be simple.
“Do what makes you happy,” Birdsong said. “And if you want to continue dancing and push for a dream, then do it. And you never know where you’ll end up, but just trust that it’ll all work out.”
And for a program still early in its inevitable history of welcoming male dancers, that mentality of deciding you belong might be the most important one. A “first” in life is one thing. What you do with it is another.
