Silver Dancers Choreographer Says So Long

By Sarah Tressler
MySanAntonio.com

If you happen to be looking for a career with the Spurs, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that a position is about to open up. The bad news is you’ve got some pretty petite shoes to fill – size 7, to be exact.

Raquel Garcia, 39, has been the Spurs Silver Dancers choreographer for more than a decade, but on Sept. 15, her contract will expire, and, with a set of 3-year-old twins and a 6-year-old son, she has decided to resign from the team, as well as from her position as choreographer for the WNBA Silver Stars SBC Star Squad dance team and The Rampage Ice Girls dance team.

“We’re in the process of looking for someone else,” said Spurs Director of Game Operations & Special Events Chris Garcia. (Full disclosure: Chris Garcia and Raquel Garcia are married.) “She reflected over this past year, and she figured it was probably time to move on and focus her family.”

The 2013 season was a big one for the Spurs, and thus a big one for the Silver Dancers.

“This past year was amazing; even though we weren’t champions at the end, it was just an awesome ride,” Raquel said.

But all those extra games at the end of the season started to add up for the new mom. She finally made the bittersweet choice to leave.

“The deciding factor for me was when I looked back at this past year – if I counted the nights when I was at rehearsal and the nights that I was working games, whether that be Spurs, The Rampage or our WNBA Silver Stars, which we’re currently in, I was away from my children 150 nights. So someone else put my own children to bed. And it should be their mommy,” Raquel Garcia said. “There’s no price tag I can put on that.”

The audition process to select next season’s Silver Dancers started Aug. 10 and was one of her last orders of business.

More than a hundred girls in hot shorts and fitted tank tops twirled, kicked, coupe-turned, and whipped their hair to Miranda Lambert’s “Mama’s Broken Heart” for the first round; after cuts were made, the remaining 60 or so learned a new routine to Maroon 5’s “Love Somebody.”

Throughout the instruction period, Raquel Garcia, energetic and petite, stood on a small stage and danced through the whole routine with the girls over and over, keeping in step while giving precise instructions through a microphone.

Just before she stepped out of a curtain-enclosed area to teach the second routine, she fished through her Louis Vuitton handbag for a stick of deodorant.

“Don’t want to stink-a-roonie!” she chirped. This neatly summarizes her personality – disarmingly sweet with an emphasis on presentation. She’s not unlike the quintessential Disney princess.

Raquel Garcia worked her way up from her high school pep squad to the to the cheer team and on to the Kilgore Rangerettes dance team in college. After graduation, she set her sights on a professional dance career and made the Silver Dancers team in 1994. With five seasons with the Silver Dancers under her belt, she took a job with an ad agency, but her passion for dance endured. In 2003, she became the choreographer for the Silver Stars dance team, followed by her position as the Silver Dancers choreographer.

Now, her plans are simple: PTA, church and working from home with a uniform-design agency outfitting pro and collegiate teams in Texas. But most importantly, “I’m gonna be a stay-home mommy,” she said.

So what does Raquel Garcia’s husband, the Spurs director of game operations, think about the end of going to work with his wife?

“It’s fantastic,” Chris Garcia said. “It’ll be nice to just be able to hold hands and walk around at the games and be married.”