Judging dance competitions demands a unique blend of skills, from articulating useful corrections on the fly to staying focused for hours at a time. With just a few minutes to see and score each routine, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by everything you may want to say—or, worse, to have nothing to say at all. Here’s how to stay organized, alert, and constructive during long judging days.

In many ways, life on the circuit has been preparing comp kids for professional auditions all along. Here’s how to best leverage your competition experience in an audition setting.

Winning the title of “Mr. or Miss [insert competition name here]” has long been considered the pinnacle of a competitive career. For decades, whether dancers actually identified with those gendered accolades—or the many other gender-based features of competition and convention weekends—was hardly ever questioned. Slowly, that’s beginning to change.

A new generation of competition-kids-turned-ballet-dancers is making its mark. Madison Brown and Brady Farrar, both dancers with American Ballet Theatre Studio Company, have roots in not only dance competitions but competitive TV shows:

Dancing across a hotel ballroom in small-town America seems a world away from performing on Broadway, but for some students, competitions and conventions are an important step toward realizing that dream. Skills honed at these events—the ability to quickly learn choreography in a wide range of styles and perform it immediately afterward—are valuable in securing work in musical theater.

Long before a dancer steps into the spotlight for a competition solo, the work of creating the steps that will lead to their success begins. With a strong partnership between dancer and choreographer, this process can be its own reward:

Dancers stack their calendars with in-person classes, competitions and social commitments. Read for advice on balancing a busy schedule, or determining when—and what—to cut back.

When you’re in rehearsals it can be easy to forget about costume changes, so we asked pros for tips on tackling quick-changes.