By Cheryl Danner
One of our goals as an organization is to be open to change and support our community’s needs as best as we can. To this end, we’ve made a number of changes to practice in recent months. If you have feedback about these changes, please send us an email, DM us, or drop an anonymous note in our Suggestion Box. You can find any of these contact methods at Contact us.
Our highest priority has always been to hold practice on a consistent weekly basis. For much of 2025, we were unable to run practice every week due to lack of availability at the Multicultural Arts Center. We value our relationship with the MAC, who has supported us for almost 4 years by providing us practice space at affordable rates. Since October, we’ve started a relationship with the The Allston Abbey and are optimistic about our future at this new home. We do miss the TV and mirrors that we had at the MAC and are hoping to spruce up our Allston Abbey practice experience with these creature comforts next year.
In response to feedback about our previous two-step sign-in and payment process, we’ve launched a new system that allows you to sign in and pay at the same time: https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/ticketing/test-practice. If you’re a regular and don’t want to bother with paying each week, you can sign up for a monthly subscription and never sign in again: https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/ticketing/hopcats-practice-membership!
We’ve also updated our suggested payment structure to account for slightly higher rental rates* at our new practice venue. Our minimum suggested payment is still $5 because making practice affordable is important to us. Here are the new suggested rates and what each amount helps us do.
*Heating and cooling the building are the primary costs.
As we navigate the transition to our new venue, you may have noticed we haven’t been hosting practice coaches as much. This isn’t because we don’t think practice coaches are valuable, it’s because we expected that it would take time to establish consistent attendance at the new venue. We didn’t want to hire practice coaches when there might be relatively few people to benefit from them (and to help subsidize the cost). We look forward to bringing back our talented assortment of practice coaches in 2026!
As of September, we stopped staffing the “beginner coach” role at practices. We still welcome beginners at practice, but we felt that this change made sense for a few reasons. Since at most one or two beginners attend any given practice, dedicating a volunteer to the beginner coach role every week is difficult to support with our limited resources. This also results in beginners being sectioned off from the rest of the group. That’s not the experience we want to provide, especially given that other organizations like Boston Swing Central and Boston Lindy Hop, and the Boston Lindy Bomb Squad provide regular opportunities for group beginner lessons. Instead, when new dancers come to practice in recent months, we’ve seen them working with Lindy Hopcats community members at practice. I just want to say: this is what I love to see! ❤️
Hopcats Sunday practices will be closed for a short winter break, but we’ll be back on January 11th. We are looking forward to hosting practice more consistently at our new space! In addition to hosting regular practices, we have other exciting plans for 2026. Stay tuned to hear about our upcoming workshop weekends, classes, Hopcats merch (!), and more.