We weren’t going to shoot the messenger.” By sundown, the Spurs had become the only NBA team without a dance squad. “ weren’t particularly thrilled with the situation,” she recalled.
It seemed to her that this decision had come from someone higher up. From the onset, the responses read suspiciously to Black. What was not family-friendly about the Spurs Silver Dancers? As Black recalled it, Martinez and Radwanski offered only powerless shrugs, and a vague explanation that “season-ticket holders no longer wanted dancers”. (Team Energy, the Spurs’ popular co-ed hip hop squad had also been cut loose.) The blindsided women pressed for answers. The Silver Dancers, they were informed, would be replaced by a new “family co-ed hype team”. Their revered coach Katie Gibbons had been fired. Quickly, Martinez and Radwanski got to the sterile business of telling the women that the Spurs Silver Dancers had been summarily disbanded. “They were people that we worked with often, people we respected,” Black said. Six of them arrived nervously to the AT&T Center to find two familiar faces from the team’s human resources department: Jaimi Martinez and Daniel Radwanski.
But within hours, the dancers’ anxieties proved founded.
