Dancing with Avery: A Preview

As the season 18 cast for ABC’s Dancing with the Stars was announced this past week, former Red Wings / Kings / Stars / Rangers player Sean Avery made DWTS history as the first NHL’er to appear on the competition.

DWTS has at least one athlete each year, and season 18 is chock full of them, including newly minted Olympic Gold Medal ice dancers Charlie White and Meryl Davis, swimmer Diana Nyad, para-olympian Amy Purdy. That’s five of twelve competitors who all know how to train and win.

nene_leakes_sean_avery_charlie_white_meryl_davis_a_l

Winners of the show often come from an athletic background too: Emmitt Smith (NFL player, season 3), Apolo Ohno (olympic speed skater, season 4), Helio Castroneves (Indy 500 driver, season 5), Kristi Yamaguchi (olympic figure skater, season 6), Shawn Johnson (olympic gymnast, season 8), Hines Ward (NFL player, season 12), and Donald Driver (NFL player, season 14).

How will Avery fair? He’s got a great pro teacher, at least to start the show with, having been paired with Karina Smirnoff. She’s never won the coveted mirror ball trophy, but she’s finished top three in the past two seasons.

Smirnoff-Avery1

However, in these behind-the-scenes shots that ABC released (above), Avery looks none-to-happy to be there. If he’s not committed to going for it, it’s going to be hard to win the audience’s favor and even harder to actually learn the dances.

Smirnoff-Avery2

The competition isn’t going to cut him and slack either. You’ve got people like Davis, White, Big Time Rush member James Maslow, and singer Cody Simpson who know how to move and keep rhythm (though for the pop singers, that doesn’t always translate to ballroom success).

So, over the coming weeks, I’ll be your guide to DWTS as Avery dones ballroom sparkles. You can expect I’ll keep up with the other athlete competitors as well as my personal DWTS crushes — pro Derek Hough, the winner of more championships than anyone else (he coached Glee’s Amber Riley to a win in the fall and is paired with Amy Purdy this season) and newly promoted pro Henry Byalikov, who has killer abs and is partnered with Diana Nyad.

If the show runs as usual, there’ll be 10 weeks of competition. Lots of new stuff happens this season with a new co-host, Erin Andrews (now with Fox Sports and 3rd place winner from season 10), as well as new things happening with the music since the house band was fired between seasons. Plus, it’s been announced that at some point in the season the celebrity/pro combinations will change and the audience will vote on that.

So, look for a review of the previous night each Tuesday for as long as Avery’s in the competition. The dance party starts next Monday, March 17, on ABC.

STANDING: LARA SPENCER, EMMA SLATER, BILLY DEE WILLIAMS, DANICA MCKELLAR, VALENTIN CHMERKOVSKIY, SEAN AVERY, CANDACE CAMERON BURE, MAKSIM CHMERKOVSKIY, MERYL DAVIS, NENE LEAKES, TONY DOVOLANI, SHARNA BURGESS, CHARLIE WHITE, CHERYL BURKE, DREW CAREY, DIANA NYAD, HENRY BYALIKOV, ERIN ANDREWS; SITTING: KARINA SMIRNOFF, DEREK HOUGH, MARK BALLAS, PETA MURGATROYD, JAMES MASLOW, WITNEY CARSON, CODY SIMPSON; FRONT: TOM BERGERON

Jeff is excited to bring his love of dance competition shows to PuckBuddys after blogging about both DWTS and So You Think You Can Dance at jeffandwill.com. Jeff’s regular PuckBuddys beat includes the Red Wings and reviewing fiction that features gay hockey players. In addition, he’s written a young adult novel, Hat Trick, which details the coming out of two high school hockey players. He’s currently working on two sequels to that book. You can follow him on Twitter at @hockeyguynyc.

Advertisements
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.

12 Responses to Dancing with Avery: A Preview

  1. And it results in a higher harvest of the foods involved.
    There are three distinct steps for creating your aquaponics system.
    A twelve inch depth also should never need cleaning if a good healthy eco-system is established, it needs to be able to take proper itself.

  2. Pingback: Tarasenko, Laich injured; Selling hockey to women; Sean Avery’s DWTS debut … – Yahoo Canada Sports (blog) | Quick & Fast Sports News

  3. Pingback: Tarasenko, Laich injured; Selling hockey to women; Sean Avery’s DWTS debut … – Yahoo Canada Sports (blog) | Best Sport Outlet

  4. Pingback: Tarasenko, Laich injured; Selling hockey to women; Sean Avery’s DWTS debut … – Yahoo Canada Sports (blog) | Sporting tools mart

  5. Pingback: Tarasenko, Laich injured; Selling hockey to women; Sean Avery’s DWTS debut (Puck Headlines) | NHLRealTalk

  6. Pingback: Tarasenko, Laich injured; Selling hockey to women; Sean Avery’s DWTS debut … – Yahoo Canada Sports (blog) | Best Sport Mart

  7. Pingback: Tarasenko, Laich injured; Selling hockey to women; Sean Avery’s DWTS debut … – Yahoo Canada Sports (blog) | outdoor sport mart

  8. Pingback: Tarasenko, Laich injured; Selling hockey to women; Sean Avery’s DWTS debut … – Yahoo Canada Sports (blog) | Deals to find

  9. Miles says:

    It’s truly very difficult in this active life to listen news on TV, so I just use world wide web for that reason,
    and obtain the most up-to-date news.

  10. Pretty nice post. I just stumbled upon your blog and wished to mention that
    I’ve really enjoyed surfing around your weblog
    posts. After all I will be subscribing for your rss feed and I hope you write once more soon!

  11. Pick many best dubstep artists today in addition to being much as they never reveal it, a lot of them are using Dubturbo.

    Dubstep is due to Drum and Bass, so that the dubstep beats are incredibly important.

    First off, dubstep is just not electro house, nor could it be even related
    to techno, rave parties or any pop music, for instance.

  12. Carmine says:

    Hello, of course this paragraph is genuinely good and I have learned lot
    of things from it about blogging. thanks.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s