By the time 11:50 p.m. rolled around, dancers had been standing for 14 hours and feet were aching, but the smiles around the gym weren’t going anywhere.
The anticipation mounted even further as the cards were laid out on the stage, the very cards that would reveal that USCDM raised a record-breaking $501,528.
“There are literally no words,” Leslie Knight, the Executive Director of USCDM, said. “I knew it was going to be close, so to see that it actually happened is just incredible.
And that total was kept quiet until the very end of the closing ceremonies.
“We barely broke [$500,000],” Alli Held, USCDM finance committee director, said. “We were talking about it, and we know that’s because we pushed our participants and they pushed themselves so hard until the last minute and you know, it’s those last minute donations, in the last 10 minutes that pushed us over.”
Held admitted she was a little nervous about making it all the way to their goal. Anyone would be with a public goal, she said, and this was the first year USCDM worked toward a set amount.
“But we went into today knowing exactly what we had to do — feeling so confident in our entire team and feeling so confident in all the participants that came," she said, "and we just knew it was going to happen.”
During the event participants took to social media, asking for donations in the final stretch of the main event and it paid off with the smiles and tears of happiness that followed.
“I don’t like needles, but I would get that number tattooed on my body,” Lexie Player, a Mini Marathon committee member. “It’s fabulous!”
And as USCDM 2015 drew to a close, it was a time for reflection.
After her final USCDM, Knight said the year went by before she knew it, but it still "took forever," since preparations had been in the works since last year's Main Event.
Knight hopes to come back to see the event creating an even bigger buzz in the future.
“Public goals are very scary — we learned that this year,” she said. “But I’m confident. I would love to see them blow what we just did out of the water."