Anchorage teen goes from dance barre to barbells with impressive ease

Fifteen-year-old Kaylie Ball is a dancer who doesn't always need a choreographer to stage a showstopper. Sometimes it's just a matter of the right travel itinerary — and a whole lot of strength and stamina.

A freshman at South High, Ball is as comfortable with barbells as she is at a dance barre, which is how she managed to pull off a marquee performance a couple of weeks ago.

In a span of less than 48 hours, Ball won a national high school powerlifting championship in Pennsylvania and appeared in a musical production in Anchorage, where she was a featured dancer and a member of the chorus for "West Side Story."

"I don't know how she's doing it — max out your lifts and then do a three-hour musical where you're dancing and spinning around and all that stuff," said Rob Schmidt, the former chairman of USA Powerlifting's Alaska division. "Most people after a powerlifting competition, they just want to sit on a couch."

Ball, a petite 126 pounds, set three state records while winning the girls junior varsity championship at the USA Powerlifting High School National Championships on March 29 in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

The next day, she was singing and dancing her way through "West Side Story" at Goldenview Middle School. Ball reached Anchorage just in time to get her hair and makeup done for the 7 p.m. curtain rising.

The show, after all, must go on. Even with muscles that are beyond sore and tender.

"I train so much and dance so much, I'm always sore," Ball said. "I'm fairly used to it, but yeah, I'm generally very, very sore after moving so much weight."

Ball moved a whole lot of weight in Scranton, where she established personal and state age-group records in both squat and deadlift and tied her PR and state record in the bench press.

In breaking her deadlift PR by 10 kilos, Ball lifted nearly twice her body weight with a lift of 107 kilos, or 237.5 pounds. She recorded a personal-best lift of 204 pounds in the squat and tied her PR of 104 pounds in the bench press.

Ball has been dancing for more than 10 years but is a relative newcomer to powerlifting. She gave the sport a try four years ago after watching her mother, Theresa Ball, turn to powerlifting to deal with a couple of injuries.

She stuck with it because of the way it makes her feel.

"One day I just said, hey, I want to try this," Ball said. "I deadlifted 140 pounds and thought, 'Wow, I want to keep doing this. I like how this feels.'

"I had body images — I was really skinny — so when I saw how I looked lifting, I wanted to keep doing it. I like the way people look when they have muscle."

Ball believes her two passions work well together. A lot of her strength comes from dancing, she said, "and my powerlifting got a lot better and my dancing got a lot better by using them simultaneously."

Powerlifting helped Ball stay active when she pulled tendons in her hip while dancing about two years ago. She wound up on crutches twice, once at the end of seventh grade and once at the end of eighth grade, and although she wasn't able to squat or deadlift during that time, "my bench press got a lot better," she said.

The injuries ended Ball's pursuit of competitive dance, but powerlifting sates her competitive urge. It's also led to a certain amount of popularity.

"Most people know me as a powerlifter," she said "so all my teachers will say, 'Hey, can you watch this video of my form and tell me if I'm doing it right?' ''

She's also done her share of heavy lifting for friends who ask for her help when they need to move a bed or a couch.

Then there are those times when she is the liftee instead of the lifter.

For her role as Velma in "West Side Story," Ball danced with a 6-foot-6 boy who had to lift her a couple of times during the performance.

"You have to be really trusting that I'm not gonna fall six feet in the air," she said. "I've taken him to the gym a few times and shown him how to lift."

Correction: An earlier version of this story mentioned Rob Schmidt as the current chairman of USA Powerlifting's Alaska division. He is the former chairman.