Most dance team tryout score sheets look the same because most of them were photocopied from the same one. Kicks, splits, leaps, turns, five points each. Routine, twenty points. Total it up, post the numbers. It works right up until two judges hand back totals eleven points apart on the same dancer, or a parent emails to ask what exactly separated 78 from 79, and there is no answer on the sheet because the sheet never said what a 4 meant.
The fix is not a prettier form. It is deciding, in writing, what each number stands for and what the categories are worth relative to each other. That work takes an hour once and it holds for years. Here is the rubric, the weighting, and the three habits that decide more tryouts than anyone admits.
The 100 point dance team tryout rubric
Split the sheet into technical skills and routine, weighted 40 to 60. The routine carries more because a dance team performs routines, not isolated skills, and a dancer who can hold a triple pirouette but cannot retain eight counts of choreography is a problem you will be solving all season.
Swipe sideways to see the full table
| Block | Category | Points | What the top score means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Technical skills (40) | Turns | 10 | Clean spot, held passe or coupe, controlled finish, no travel. Rotations beyond a double count as range, not as the score. |
| Technical skills (40) | Leaps and jumps | 10 | Full split line in the air, square hips, quiet landing on a bent supporting leg, consistent height across repetitions. |
| Technical skills (40) | Kicks | 10 | Height at or above shoulder with a straight supporting leg, controlled descent, same height on the sixth kick as the first. |
| Technical skills (40) | Flexibility and lines | 10 | Full splits both sides, pointed feet, extended arms with intent, visible turnout where the style calls for it. |
| Routine (60) | Technique in the combination | 20 | Everything above holds while dancing. Skills do not degrade when they sit inside choreography and transitions. |
| Routine (60) | Retention and accuracy | 15 | Every count, every direction, every level change as taught. No hesitation, no watching neighbours. |
| Routine (60) | Timing and musicality | 10 | On the count and inside the phrasing. Dynamics match the music rather than running at one speed. |
| Routine (60) | Performance and projection | 15 | Carries the routine to the back of the room. Face and body agree with the style. Recovers from a mistake without flinching. |
Score each category on a 1 to 5 scale and multiply, rather than asking a judge to pull a number out of 15 in four seconds. A judge can tell the difference between a 3 and a 4. Nobody can reliably tell the difference between an 11 and a 12 out of 15, and pretending otherwise is where the eleven point gaps come from.
Write the descriptors, or the sheet does nothing
This is the step everyone skips. For each category, write one line for each of 5, 3 and 1, and let judges interpolate. For turns: 5 is a controlled double or better with a clean finish, 3 is a completed single with minor travel or an unfinished spot, 1 is an attempted turn that does not complete. Three lines per category, thirty minutes of work, and suddenly your judges are measuring the same thing. Without them a score sheet is just a place to record opinions neatly.
Weighting changes by program, and it should
The 40 to 60 split is a sensible default, not a law. What the team does all year should decide what the sheet rewards.
Swipe sideways to see the full table
| Program | Suggested split | Why |
|---|---|---|
| All star dance | 45 technical / 55 routine | Technique is scored directly at competition and the tier decision depends on it, so individual skill carries more weight than at a sideline program. |
| High school dance team | 35 technical / 55 routine / 10 conduct | The team performs constantly in front of its own school. Retention, projection and reliability matter more than a fourth rotation. |
| Drill team | 30 technical / 70 routine | Precision and uniformity are the product. A drill team wants dancers who match, and matching is a routine block skill. |
| Middle school or first year program | 30 technical / 60 routine / 10 coachability | You are selecting trainability, not finished dancers. How fast a candidate absorbs a correction predicts the season better than a current split. |
Keep any conduct or coachability category small and force a written comment whenever it scores below full marks. Unexplained soft categories are how a tryout quietly becomes a popularity contest, and they are the first thing an unhappy family will point at.
Three scoring habits that decide more tryouts than the rubric
The sheet is half the job. How the panel uses it is the other half, and these three fixes cost nothing.
Judge by category, not by candidate. Run every dancer through turns, then every dancer through leaps. Judges calibrate against what they just saw, so scoring one category in a block keeps the standard steady. Score candidate by candidate and the dancer who follows a strong one gets marked down for it.
Use numbers, not names. Candidates wear numbers, judges score numbers, and the name list stays with one person who is not judging. It will not remove every bias, but it removes the easy ones and it makes the result far easier to stand behind.
Drop the high and the low. With three or more judges, discard the highest and lowest score per category before totalling. One judge who runs consistently generous no longer decides the team, and the panel stops needing to agree in order to be fair.
All star dance tryouts have a second job
A school tryout answers one question: is this dancer on the team. An all star tryout answers two, because the same session has to place the dancer on a specific team in a specific tier, and those tiers are defined by skills your score sheet either captured or did not.
The distinctions are concrete. In the Intermediate tier, stationary turns are capped at two rotations for Tiny, Mini and Youth and three for Junior and Senior, axle turns are out, and leaps that release the head toward the back, a C jump, firebird or ring leap, are not allowed for Tiny and Mini. Novice bans those leaps in every division and caps turns at two with the working leg in pencil, passe or coupe. So a tryout sheet that records only turns: 4 out of 5 has thrown away the information you need in October. Record the rotation count and the position. Record whether the leap released the head back. Those two extra marks are the difference between placing a dancer and guessing.
Birth year does the rest of the placing, and it does not follow the cheer bands. The full division and tier limits are on our USASF dance rules and age grid page, including the 2:00 routine cap that arrived for the 2026-2027 season and the crossover rules that let a cheer athlete join a dance routine without touching the cheer crossover limit. If you are scoring cheer tryouts in the same week, the parallel sheet and its level by level notes are on the cheerleading tryout score sheet page, and the wider running order is in how to run cheerleading tryouts.
Paper sheets, and what they cost you
Paper works for twelve candidates. At forty it starts costing real money in the only currency tryout week has, which is time. Three judges times forty candidates is 120 sheets to collect, total by hand, cross check and transcribe into a spreadsheet, usually at ten at night by someone who has been in a gym since four. Addition errors at that hour are not rare, and an addition error on a tryout sheet is the one mistake a program cannot take back gracefully.
Scoring on a tablet removes the transcription step entirely: each judge scores on their own device, totals compute as they go, the high and low drop automatically, and the ranked list exists the moment the last dancer finishes. It also produces the thing paper never does, a per category record you can hand a family when they ask, and a skills log that carries straight into team placement instead of being thrown away. That is what digital tryout scoring is for, and it sits on the same athlete profile as skill tracking, so the turns you scored in May are still there when you pick tiers in September.
The other half of tryout week is paperwork, and it is worth getting off paper for the same reason. Participation agreements, medical releases and photo consents all have to be signed before a dancer takes the floor, and chasing them by hand is how the first practice starts with four dancers watching from the side. Sending them as documents families can sign from a phone turns a week of reminders into a status list you can read in ten seconds.
Questions coaches ask about tryout score sheets
What is on a dance team tryout score sheet?
Two scored blocks. A technical skills block covering kicks, leaps, turns and flexibility performed on command, and a routine block covering technique in the combination, retention, timing and musicality, and performance. Most sheets total 100 points. Add an unscored comments column: it carries no weight but it is where the tie break argument actually gets settled, and it is what you read back to a family who asks what to work on.
How do you score a dance team tryout fairly?
Define every number before anyone dances, with a written descriptor for 5, 3 and 1 in each category. Judge one category across all candidates rather than one candidate across all categories. Keep judges from seeing each other's sheets during the session. With three or more judges, drop the high and low score per category. And score by number rather than by name.
How many points should a dance team tryout be out of?
One hundred, because the totals read as percentages and everyone understands them instantly. The total matters far less than the spread inside it. A sheet weighted 40 technical and 60 routine selects a different dancer from one weighted the other way, so the weighting is the real decision and the total is only arithmetic.
How do you handle a tie at dance team tryouts?
Publish the tie break order in the tryout packet before tryouts, not after. A workable order is highest routine technique score, then highest retention score, then a short head to head re performance of the combination in front of the panel. When the rule was printed in a packet the family already read, the answer to why her and not my daughter stops being a personal judgement.
Should dance team tryouts be scored by outside judges?
Use at least one judge with no connection to any candidate, and three in total if you can. Outside judges do not remove bias so much as make it visible. When the outside judge and the staff judges split by more than a point on the same dancer, that gap is worth a conversation, and having had it is what lets you answer a family with confidence rather than defensiveness.
Run the tryout, then keep the data
The score sheet is not really a selection document. It is the first skills record of the season, and most programs throw it in a drawer in May and start guessing again in September. Keep it attached to the dancer and the tryout has paid for itself twice: once when it picks the team, and again when it tells you which tier that team belongs in.