Tryouts are behind you, rosters are set, and the choreography window is open. This is the decision that quietly shapes your whole season — because the routine you buy in August is the one your athletes will live inside until finals. Choose the wrong choreographer and you spend the next eight months cleaning around problems that were built in on day one.
New season, same trap: too many programs pick a choreographer off a highlight reel and a reveal-day feeling. That's how you end up with a routine that photographs beautifully and bleeds deductions on the mat. Here's how to vet the person you're about to hand your season to.
Start with what went wrong last year
Before you look at a single new name, pull your score sheets from last season. Not the placements — the deductions. Where did points actually leave the mat? Bobbled dismounts? A standing tumbling section that never fully hit? A pyramid transition that ate time and never cleaned up?
That pattern is your brief. A choreographer isn't a decorator you hire to make things look good; they're the person who has to design around your program's real strengths and gaps. If last year's routine buried your best tumblers in a back corner and force-fed skills your athletes couldn't land at full-out, that's a design failure — and it tells you exactly what to interview for this time.
If you rebooked the same choreographer out of habit last year, this is the season to ask whether that routine earned it. Loyalty is worth something. A repeat of the same execution problems is not.
The questions that actually separate pros from sellers
When you get a choreographer on a call, most owners ask about availability and turnaround. Those matter, but they don't tell you whether this person can score. Ask these instead:
- "How do you design to the score sheet?" A real answer references execution versus difficulty, where the point ceilings are for your division, and how they'll sequence skills to bank guaranteed points before reaching for risky ones. A vague answer about "energy" and "wow moments" is a red flag.
- "What do you do when my athletes can't hit what you built?" The honest pros build in a cleanup pass and adjust. Listen for whether they treat your roster as fixed reality or as an inconvenience to their vision.
- "How do you use my roster's actual skill levels?" They should be asking you about your standing tumbling numbers, your top-tier flyers, your basket group, your jumps. If they're not asking, they're not designing for your team — they're recycling.
A good choreographer doesn't sell you the prettiest routine. They sell you the one your athletes can hit clean at full-out in April — because a clean 4 beats a sloppy 5 every single time on the score sheet.
Difficulty you can't hit is just deductions waiting to happen
This is the mistake I see cost programs the most placements. A choreographer packs the routine with the hardest legal skills for your level to make the difficulty score sing on paper — and never asks whether your athletes can land those skills nine times out of ten under competition pressure.
Come January, you're not scoring that difficulty. You're eating deductions on falls, bobbles, and unfinished skills, and your execution score is in the basement. Meanwhile the team that built a slightly more conservative routine and hit it clean is standing above you at awards.
The right choreographer designs at the level your athletes can own, not the ceiling they can occasionally touch. They know the difference between a routine that looks hard in the reveal and one that scores in the third round of the day when legs are gone. If you want the deeper breakdown of how winning routines get built, I wrote a full piece on it: how to build a routine that actually wins.
A real scenario: Riverline Athletics
Take a program I'll call Riverline Athletics — a solid mid-size gym with a Level 4 senior coed team that finished mid-pack last season and wanted a Summit bid this year. Their old routine maxed difficulty on paper. It also lost them a full point in execution at three of their four competitions, mostly on a standing tumbling section half the team couldn't hit clean and a pyramid transition that ran long.
Going into the new season, the temptation was to buy an even harder routine and "out-difficulty" the field. The smarter move was the opposite. Redesign around what the roster could actually land: keep the difficulty where their execution was rock-solid, rebuild the transition so it stopped bleeding time, and feature their two strongest tumblers instead of hiding them. Same athletes. Cleaner mat. A routine built to score in April, not just impress in August.
That's the difference between choreography as decoration and choreography as strategy.
What "one cleanup session" really signals
When you're comparing choreographers, look at what happens after the routine is taught. A choreographer who hands you eight counts of eight and disappears is selling you a product. One who builds in a cleanup session — coming back to sharpen sync, tighten transitions, and fix the spots that fell apart once your coaches ran it at full-out — is selling you a result.
That follow-through is where routines actually get their points. The choreography sets the ceiling; the cleanup is how you reach it. When you evaluate a choreographer for the new season, treat the cleanup pass as non-negotiable, not a bonus.
Fit matters more than fame
The most-followed name in your region isn't automatically right for your program. A choreographer who works constantly with Worlds-level flyers may not design well for a developing Level 2 team, and vice versa. What you want is someone whose experience matches your athletes' reality and who has actually moved programs like yours up the score sheet.
My All Star Choreography work is built on exactly that: full competition routines designed around your roster and your division's score sheet, with a cleanup session included so the routine you reveal in August is the one that scores in the spring. Twenty-plus years, teams to Worlds and Summit, and a design philosophy that starts with execution — not the highlight reel.
Ask to talk to a program they've actually moved
Reels are curated; results are not. Before you sign, ask the choreographer to point you to a program like yours that they moved up the score sheet — and then actually reach out to that coach. Ask the questions that matter: Did the routine hold up once you ran it at full-out? Did the difficulty match what your athletes could hit clean? Did they come back for the cleanup, or disappear after teach day?
A choreographer who's confident in their work will hand you those names without flinching. One who deflects to "you'll just have to trust the process" is telling you something. The best reference isn't a highlight video — it's a coach in your division who watched their placements climb and can tell you exactly why.
Make the call before the calendar fills
The best choreographers book out early, and the new-season window is now. Waiting until October means taking whoever's left, not whoever's right. Do the score-sheet homework, ask the questions that separate strategists from sellers, and lock in the person who's designing to win in the spring — not just to look good in the reveal.
If you want a routine built around your roster and your division's score sheet for the new season, let's talk about your team.