Danielle Gray moves from amateur to pro at the U.S. National Pole Championships

[Ellen Robinson | The Beach Reporter]

The last time Danielle Gray was in the news she was a Girl Scout in the 90s. The 22-year-old Manhattan Beach native has since put her sash away and has moved up from being an amateur pole sports competitor to the professional level after this year’s U.S. National Pole Championships held last weekend at the Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center.

Gray won second place in the Level Four Championship Junior division earning her a spot competing with her coaches at next year’s event. More than 150 professional and amateur pole dancers from other regional competitions competed during the weekend-long event in the categories: women’s professional, men’s professional and amateurs, artistic professional and amateurs and lyra, which consists of movement inside an aerial hoop. Prior to the national competition, Gray qualified to compete after placing third in February at the Pacific Pole Championship.

While she hit her routine perfectly during practice on Thursday before the event, she was sure she wasn’t going to place because she had messed up doing an inside leg hang and transitioning to a move called a scorpion. She said the pole was spinning too fast.

“I would have flown off, so I had to modify my routine.”

Gray was the first competitor in her division on Sunday to take to the pole, so she had the opportunity to watch her teammates and competitors’ routines with her mom in the crowd of nearly 800 people.

“I knew I had messed up and I kept seeing these people do their routines and I was saying to myself, ‘she hit hers perfectly, I don’t have a chance of even getting on the board,’” Gray said. “I knew I could have done better, had I not hit it perfectly on that Thursday before, I probably would have been more satisfied with the fact that I messed up.”

She said being able to compete at the Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center was an honor. She grew up just a few blocks from the center.

“It was really cool to perform on the stage where my mom went to high school; she attended Aviation High!”

Pole dancing isn’t something Gray always knew that she wanted to do. Gray was a competitive gymnast in her youth and then transitioned to musical theater while attending Mira Costa High School. She graduated in 2010 and went on to study public relations and consumer behavior at USC.

During her sophomore year, a friend convinced her to sign up for a pole dancing fitness class on campus. Her friend didn’t like it, but Gray had found a new outlet for both self-expression and fitness. She continued taking classes during college and then joined a pole dancing fitness studio after college graduation.

While pole dancing often has a stigma, Gray, like many other amateur and professional pole dancers, is not a stripper.

“I had a pole in my college apartment and when the maintenance people would come in, they would always look at me like, ‘okay,’” she said. “I think the stigma is starting to change. I think when it first started becoming popular, people associated it with strippers and night life, but I don’t really know how to do those types of routines. I’m also into going up to Muscle Beach and practicing acro yoga, calisthenics and parkquor, basically the aerial arts. I think now that pole dancing has a national fitness competition, the stigma is even less,” Gray said. “They are even trying to get it into the Olympics as a sport. Pole dancing was first done by men in India.”

Gray, an account manager for online marketer Wpromote, said she practiced her artistic routine for months. With her background in gymnastics and musical theater, artistic pole dancing appeals to her.

“It’s a different kind of pole dancing. We train for months, then have to pick out a song and develop a character with a storyline. This routine’s character was personal to me. It was about a young woman who fell for a guy and her frustration of not ever being enough for him. My character tried over and over to get him to commit, but he kept pulling away, and then, in the end, I reach out one last time, then stop myself because I’m grown. I’m a better person now and I’m done with him,” she said. “So my coach choreographed my routine to express my reaching out and being pushed away. I had to portray this through my dance instead of just relying on facial expressions—Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center is a huge venue.”

Her song was “Unconditionally” by Katy Perry.

Gray said she is excited to have earned the opportunity to compete next year against her coaches in the professional division. She has a pole in her apartment that she uses for practice and she drives out to The Vertitude Studio in Canoga Park three times each week. She has her eye on the gold medal in next year’s national competition.

To learn more about pole dancing fitness, check out Gray on Instagram

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