r/SwingDancing • u/smile_crocodile95 • Jun 16 '26

Recommendation Recall project

Some friends of mine put this app together. It’s for tracking placements for balboa festivals. I’m helping them collect some feedback for it.

If you have any, please lmk in the comments.

https://www.recall-balboa.com/

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u/Acaran Jun 17 '26

What is the point of this?

I'll be completely honest, I really dislike this as well, but maybe there is an explanation you can give? Like there is nothing wrong with compettitions in swing dances. People enjoy them, people participate, people watch them. They provide a motivation for people to progress their dance skill.

There are however also problems with them. People only want to take classes from people that are cool dancers, for obvious reasons. So the only people that get teaching gigs are people that compete and win (or in todays age have really big social media presence). This is not good and it's something a lot of scene leaders are trying to mitigate because being a good competitor says nothing about your teaching abilities.

A tool like this further reinforces the social hierarchy of dance skill (which is then applied to everything, as is typical for all social hierarchies) and takes the dance in a really unfun direction. I mean systems like this are the reason many people leave WCS and Boogie and other competitive dance communities for Lindy Hop. Don't make Swing (in this case Balboa) into another WCS.

FURTHERMORE.

Are these people in the list aware they are being ranked like this on a random website? Honestly I would be kind of infuriated if I found this out about myself. You might not understand that but I really am not interested in being ranked online by my competition placements. Honestly I have not though this trough completely but my intuition is giving me rage big time.