You've watched it happen. Two teams take the floor with roughly the same talent, the same size roster, the same clean-enough technique. One routine feels like a performance you can't look away from. The other feels like a team hitting counts. Same skills, different score. If you've ever walked off the floor knowing your dancers were technically fine but the number didn't reflect it, this post is for you.
Pom and lyrical are judged differently than a cheer routine, and coaches who treat them like "cheer with softer arms" leave points everywhere. The score sheet rewards a specific blend of clean technique, genuine performance, and choreographic choices that read from the back row of the arena. Here's how to build for all three.
Artistry and technique are not a trade-off
The biggest myth in pom and lyrical is that you pick a lane: the technical team or the artistic team. Judges don't score it that way. Technique is the price of admission — feet, lines, timing, extension, control. Artistry is what those clean skills earn you once they're locked in. You can't perform your way out of sloppy technique, and you can't technique your way out of a flat, lifeless performance.
Artistry isn't the opposite of technique. On a pom or lyrical score sheet, artistry is what your technique earns once it's clean, synchronized, and delivered with a performer who actually means it.
So the sequence matters. Clean the technical foundation first, then layer the performance on top of skills the dancers can already hit in their sleep. When you try to add facials and dynamics before the movement is automatic, athletes tense up and both scores drop. Build the floor, then build the feeling.
What pom judges actually reward
Pom lives and dies on visual impact. Sharpness, synchronization, and formation changes carry the sheet. A pom routine that reads as one organism — every wrist snapping to the same count, every level change hitting together — scores far above a team of talented individuals dancing near each other.
Focus your cleaning time on the things judges see from a distance: arm placement (a pom motion that's two inches off on ten dancers is a visible break), timing on hits, and the crispness of transitions between formations. Difficulty matters, but a difficult skill executed at 80% synchronization loses to a slightly easier skill hit at 100%. Judges reward what they can trust.
Formations are your cheapest points in pom. Clean windows, staggered levels, and ripples that actually ripple in sequence create the "how did they do that" moments that lift a performance score without adding a single new skill. The choreography — where bodies go and when — is doing as much work as the movement itself.
What lyrical judges actually reward
Lyrical flips the emphasis. Now it's about extension, control, emotional connection, and the quality of movement between the skills. A lyrical judge is watching your dancers' ability to sustain — to hold a balance without a wobble, to control the descent out of a leap, to move through choreography rather than from pose to pose.
The unglamorous truth: lyrical is won in the transitions. Anyone can hit a leap. Fewer teams can make the three counts before and after that leap look intentional and connected. When you choreograph lyrical, treat the connective movement as choreography, not as travel time. That's where the artistry score is decided.
Emotional connection is real and it's scored. It's not about dramatic faces — it's about a performer who commits to the story of the music so fully that the audience feels it. That connection starts with music that gives the dancers something to perform. If your track is generic, your dancers have nothing to connect to, which is exactly why I wrote how to choose music that actually scores — the music choice is a scoring decision before a single count is set.
The first impression sets the ceiling
In both disciplines, the opening seconds tell the judge what kind of team you are, and that impression colors everything that follows. If your first formation is crisp and your first sequence is fully committed, the judge is now looking for reasons to keep scoring you high. If you open tentative, they're looking for confirmation you're a middle-of-the-pack team. This is the same principle that plays out on the cheer floor — I broke it down in 5 things judges notice in the first 30 seconds, and it applies just as hard to pom and lyrical.
Open with something the whole team can hit at full commitment, every single time. Don't lead with your hardest skill. Lead with your cleanest impact moment.
A real scenario: Willow Creek Pom & Lyrical
Take a program I'll call Willow Creek — a mid-size studio with a strong pom line and a small, talented lyrical group. Their dancers were genuinely good. Their scores were stuck. Watching film, two things jumped out: the pom routine was a string of skills with no formation strategy, so all that sharpness was landing in flat lines the judge had seen a hundred times. And the lyrical piece was built around three beautiful leaps with dead space in between — the dancers were essentially waiting for the next skill.
Nothing about the roster needed to change. What needed to change was the choreography. Rebuild the pom around formation changes and level work so the sharpness had somewhere to land. Rebuild the lyrical so the connective movement told a continuous story and the leaps arrived as peaks, not islands. Same dancers, same skills, choreography built to score. That's the difference between a routine that showcases talent and one that converts talent into placement.
Pom & lyrical choreography built to score
This is exactly what JMT's pom and lyrical choreography is designed to do. It's expressive and music-driven, built around your specific dancers and their real strengths, with performance coaching included — because choreography and the delivery of that choreography are the same job. The goal isn't a pretty routine. The goal is a routine engineered around the score sheet: clean technical foundations, formation and transition work that reads from the back row, and a performance the judges believe.
If you're running both a pom line and a lyrical group, the strategy differs for each, and building them without that distinction is how good teams end up underscored. Choreography that understands what each discipline rewards is the highest-leverage investment you can make in a competitive season — it multiplies the talent you already have.
Where to start this season
Before you set a single count, get three things settled: the music (it's a scoring decision, not a vibe), the honest technical level your dancers can hit at 100% synchronization under pressure, and the two or three impact moments you'll build the whole routine to serve. Get those right and the choreography has something to stand on. Coach Jason "Coach J" Tiede has built routines across every discipline in 20-plus years as an all-star national champion, back-to-back World Finals athlete, and Program Director of Cheer Athletics UK — and pom and lyrical get the same score-sheet-first attention as the highest-level work.
When you're ready to build a pom or lyrical routine designed to score — not just to look good — that conversation starts at the booking link below.