Choreography season comes fast, the deposit is real money, and you only get one shot to set the foundation your athletes will live inside for the next eight months. Pick the wrong choreographer and you spend the whole season patching a routine that never fit your roster. Pick the right one and you walk into your first competition with a floor that scores itself.
If you run an all-star program, this is one of the highest-leverage decisions you'll make all year. Here's how to make it well.
Start with the score sheet, not the highlight reel
Every choreographer has a sizzle reel. Big music, clean hits, a crowd losing its mind. That's marketing, and it tells you almost nothing about whether they can build your team a routine that places.
The real question is whether they design to the score sheet. All-star scoring rewards specific things — execution over raw difficulty, clean transitions, building skills that are legal for your level, the density of standing and running tumbling, stunt sequences that show range, and the deductions you avoid. A choreographer who thinks in score-sheet terms will ask you about your level, your USASF division, and what's actually realistic for your athletes before they ever talk about a theme.
The right choreographer doesn't just hand you eight counts of cool. They read your roster, read the score sheet, and build a routine that fits the athletes you actually have — not the ones you wish you had.
When you talk to a candidate, listen for whether they talk about points or vibes. Points win. Vibes are what you sell to the parents afterward.
Vet for fit, not just résumé
Credentials matter — you want someone who has built at the level you're competing at. Worlds and Summit experience tells you they understand what a high-pressure floor demands. National TV work and a long track record tell you they can deliver under deadline. But the best résumé in the world doesn't help you if the person can't read a roster of real kids.
Fit is the thing nobody asks about and everybody regrets later. Ask a candidate how they handle a team with two strong tumblers and a thin back-spot bench. Ask what they do when a key athlete gets hurt in October. A choreographer who has coached thousands of athletes across levels will have a real answer, because they've lived it. Someone who has only ever set difficult routines on stacked teams will give you a theory.
The questions that actually tell you something
When you're interviewing a choreographer, skip the generic stuff and ask the questions that reveal how they work:
- How do you design around our weakest skill area without leaving points on the floor?
- What's your process for matching difficulty to what's legal and clean for our level?
- Do you build in a clean-up session, and what does that look like?
- How do you handle music — do you sync the routine to the track, or hand us counts and leave us to figure it out?
- What happens if our roster changes after you set the floor?
The answers separate the pros from the people who set eight 8-counts and disappear. Music is a great tell, because a routine and its track have to be built together — if you want to go deeper on that, we wrote a whole piece on choosing music that scores.
A real-world scenario
Say you run Velocity All-Stars, and your Level 4 senior coed team finished mid-pack last season. You've got two standout tumblers, a deep stunt group, and a back half of the roster that's clean but not flashy. A choreographer who only knows how to stack difficulty will load the front of the routine, blow your athletes out by the 90-second mark, and leave your stunt strength sitting unused.
The right choreographer does the opposite. They build the floor around your stunt depth, spread the tumbling so your two standouts anchor different sections instead of competing for the same eight counts, and design transitions that keep your cleaner back-half athletes doing what they do well — in formation, on time, no deductions. Same roster, completely different score. That's the difference between someone who sets choreography and someone who builds a routine that wins. We broke down that build process in detail in our guide on how to build a routine that actually wins.
Watch how they handle clean-up
Choreography day is the easy part. Everyone looks good when the music's loud and the energy's high and the routine is brand new. The season is won in the weeks after, when you're cleaning, when athletes are forgetting counts, when the formations drift.
A choreographer who cares about your placement builds the handoff into the job. That means a clean-up session where they come back, watch the team run it, and fix what's broken before it calcifies into a habit. It means they leave you with something coachable — not a routine only they understand. Ask directly: after choreography day, what do I actually have, and how do you set my staff up to maintain it?
Think about it as an investment in placement
The temptation every season is to shop on convenience or to chase the lowest number. But choreography isn't a line item — it's the foundation everything else rests on. A routine built to the score sheet, matched to your roster, and cleaned properly pays you back in placement, in athlete confidence, and in the parents who re-enroll because their kid had a great season.
When you're weighing cost, weigh it against what a podium finish does for your program — recruiting, retention, reputation. The right routine is the cheapest thing you'll buy all year measured against what it returns. If you want a quote scoped to your team's level and roster, that conversation starts at the booking link below, not with a price list.
What JMT brings to an all-star floor
This is exactly what All Star Choreography from JMT is built for. Coach Jason "Coach J" Tiede has spent 20-plus years at the highest level of this sport — an all-star national champion, a back-to-back World Finals athlete, choreography on national TV commercials, and Program Director of Cheer Athletics UK. He's coached more than a thousand athletes and sent teams to Worlds and Summit. He took Intensity Elite Cheer from roughly 30 athletes on four teams to 180-plus on twelve.
What that means for your team: a full competition routine designed around your actual roster and your score sheet, built with Worlds and Summit-level instincts, with a clean-up session included so the floor you get on choreography day is the floor your athletes can still hit in February. Not a reel. A routine that places.
Choosing a choreographer is choosing who sets the ceiling on your season. Choose someone who reads the score sheet, reads your roster, and stays through the clean-up.