Inside Smith Gym on Friday nights, passersby might hear the sounds of country music spilling from the windows, along with the stomps of boots against the hardwood floor. The WSU Country Swing Club holds weekly meetings in the gym from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. Friday nights.
The club has been up and running for about five years now and is one of the most rapidly growing clubs on campus. It is the largest RSO to date with roughly 2,500 members, an average of about 150 attendees at every meeting.
Senior and club president, Audrey Elliot, has been running the club for two semesters. She first started swing dancing when she was a first-year student, but has been involved in some form of dance since she was in eighth grade.
During her first year, Elliot was elected into an officer position in the club, which she held for two semesters before doing PR for a semester, and finally worked her way up to running the club herself.
Over the course of her presidency, Elliot has made it a mission of hers to eliminate the hierarchy within the club she felt it had when she first joined.
“Something that I brag about a lot is that this club is one of the most welcoming, expressive environments here on campus,” Elliot said. “When I first joined the club, they felt like there was a bit of a divide between the members and the officers, and I made it my mission since I became an officer to kind of eliminate that barrier so that people that show up don’t see us as teachers or authority figures. I want us to be seen as friends, somebody that you can come up and talk to whenever you want and interact with.”
A positive environment is what keeps people going back to clubs and activities. When that hierarchy feel is removed, it becomes a lot more open and a more positive and healthy space.
“I definitely pride at this club on our ability to welcome anybody and everybody to this environment, and there is not a rigid hierarchy and everybody feels comfortable,” Elliot said. “In a democratic setting, I think that this club exists by and for its members, and that’s what I want. I want me and my staff to emulate how important the people are, that we do this always for them.”
Elliot, and many of her fellow officers, will be graduating within the next semester, and she hopes to build up a strong officer team within this next semester to leave the club with.
“I wanna leave this club with a very strong leadership team. I think that right now, I do a lot of the work and the other officers are really good at administering meetings,” Elliot said. “I fully recognized that this club is growing at such an insane rate, that it’s very quickly going to be impossible for one person to handle alone.”
However, with new officers coming into the role this coming semester, Elliot feels very confident in their ability and their capability to lead the club, as well as their ability to grow and learn along with it.
“I am incredibly confident in my new electives. I know them all very well and I think that they’re going to do a really great job,” Elliot said. “I feel that these three are excellent additions to the team and they’re going to get trained pretty hard-core next semester. I think that’s what needs to be done for this club to be taken over and hopefully continue in its amazing track that has been on.”
Something else Elliot would love to see is if the club could get a larger space for meetings.
“It is super crowded in the gym and I want to keep growing the club, and we can’t do that if we don’t have the space,” Elliot said. “That’s something I’m going to be working really hard on for next year, possibly finding us a new venue so that we can continue to grow and have space and people not sweat horrifically in the Smith gym.”
Despite the spacing challenges, the club continues to be prosperous. However, Elliot recognizes there are other changes that could be beneficial to continue to grow the club.
“I would like to see this club continue to add in numbers and hopefully diversify with dance,” Elliot said. “I think the country swing is incredibly popular and I think that country line dancing is also incredibly popular, but I also recognize that we will not continue to grow and be as popular if we do not teach other styles of dance or incorporate things that are more popular within the modern day dance scene.”
As the club continues to grow and change, the passion of those who started it and continue to lead it is part of the reason so many students join and continue to attend. They love it. They love dancing and forming a community for themselves through it.
Whether you are there to learn a new dance step or simply to make friends the WSU Country Swing Club always has its doors open with music pouring out of them for all to come and enjoy.
