The Coquettes dance team was prohibited from performing during timeouts in Saturday's USC men's basketball game at the request of an unknown official from the USC athletics department.
Team member Kirby Springs, a third-year retail and sports management student, said her coach, Michele Fields, had made the announcement just before the game.
"Our coach just kind of told us we couldn't dance during timeouts anymore," she said.
Coquettes captain Erin Widdle, a fourth-year exercise science student, said that usually the Coquettes perform before and after the game as well as during timeouts. Widdle said that cheerleading coach Erica Goodwin had passed along a message from the athletic department that the Coquettes were not to perform during timeouts.
"The cheerleading coach came to us and said it was passed on to her that it was passed on to us that we were not to do any dancing during timeouts because our dances in the past have been too suggestive," Widdle said.
Widdle added that Fields had given no indication that their Saturday performance would be cut short and that "nobody even said anything to us that we were not going to perform."
Widdle also said that although she accepted the athletic department's decision, USC fans had noticed something amiss when the dancers failed to appear on the court.
"The fact that we weren't out there like we normally are raised questions, and the fans wanted to know why we were just sitting there instead of dancing and cheering during the timeout," she said.
"We usually dance around the court before the games," Springs said. "During the full timeouts we'd just go around the court, and if the band played the fight song we'd dance to the fight song."
"We're still allowed to perform around the court before the games," she said. "Other than that, we have to sit on the sidelines."
Widdle said there might have been a communication failure between the dance team and the athletic department, and that "by the time that (the order) gets to us it's pretty watered down."
Springs and Widdle said initially that the athletic department thought their dancing was "too sexual," but Widdle later said that she wasn't sure why they had been asked to stay off the floor.
Widdle said she was surprised that the team's previous performances might have offended anyone. She said that the team had learned most of its choreography from the National Dance Association.
"The majority of it was something, actually, that the national chapter made up, and we just performed it."
She emphasized that the Coquettes were not part of the athletic department, and that its administrators were doing them a kindness in allowing them to perform at all.
"We try really hard and it just seems like nobody really cares," she said.
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