Spreading Joy with the Golden State Warriors’ Senior Dance Squad

Purpose in 60 Seconds – Warriors’ Senior Dance Team Finds Joy and Belonging on an NBA Court

For the dancers of the Golden State Warriors Hardwood Classics, being part of the team is about much more than a one-minute routine on a basketball court.

It’s about joy, connection, and staying whole – emotionally, mentally, and physically – in the latter half of life. Each member is 55 or older, with the oldest current member still jamming at 72.

“The Hardwood Classics are a beautiful testament that no matter your age, you’re not done until you’re done,” Sabrina Ellison, senior director of the Warriors’ entertainment team, told The Mercury News. 

At 47, it’ll be another eight years before she can join the squad. So for now, she holds it to the principles it was started with eight years ago – a serious, rigorous dance group, sharing choreographers with all the other Warriors dance teams.

That challenge is central to the dancers’ fulfillment – well,  that and their own hard work. Ten to 20 hours of practice go into every 60-second performance, with some members incorporating regular cardio and strength training beyond rehearsals to ensure their bodies can keep up with the team’s professional standards.

The intensity, focus, and visibility affirm that they are still capable, still growing, and still worthy of being taken seriously.

The exhilaration of each performance fuels the discipline needed for the next one.

“You can’t explain it,” said team captain Carol Uyeda, 61. “I’ve tried to explain it to my kids. They would ask me, ‘What’s the draw?’ I say, ‘It’s the feeling when you run out on that court and there’s 18,000 people all focusing on you. It just brings you up.’”

The group is a mix of amateurs and professionals. Ellison explains: “We don’t just focus on dancers that have had years and years of experience. We focus on those that are going to make our fan base feel something.”

Some members of the 16-person squad used to dance for the Warriors in their youth, including Dion Wiedenhoefer, Marcy Borghi, Marlo Dewing, and Uyeda, who returned to professional dance after a career in biotech. She said seeing an ad for the Classics team “was a dream come true.”  

Loneliness is an issue for millions of Americans, but its risks and effects can both be particularly pronounced later in life. So, like many adults, the dancers say that making friends in their 60s and 70s can be difficult, but the Hardwood Classics function like a chosen family.

Members cheer each other on, celebrate birthdays together, and provide emotional support – crucial through major life transitions, illness and aging. Several dancers have returned to the court after cancer, while others navigate the uncertainty of how long their bodies will allow them to keep performing.

Within the team, vulnerabilities are met head-on rather than deferred in isolation.

“I get emotional thinking because I know how hard everyone works,” Uyeda said. “We all love this team. I’m just so grateful to be here.”

A Place for Ukrainian Soldiers to Heal from the Trauma of War

Hidden deep in the pine forests of Ukraine, a place called Forest Glade offers soldiers a respite from combat. From the outside, it’s an imposing structure, like the Soviet regime that built it, but its insides make clear its new noble purpose – a mental health rehabilitation hospital giving Ukraine’s defenders a safe, if brief, moment to rest.

It’s a rare opportunity to develop skills that may help them on the path to recovery from the mental injuries of war. May is the operative word; though every resident has seen deep trauma, they can only spend three weeks in treatment before they’re expected to return to the front line. 

Filmmaker Ksenia Savoskina grew curious about Forest Glade after her father became a patient there, eventually directing a gripping 15-minute documentary for The Guardian about the facility, seen through the eyes of Kyrylo Chuvak, a soldier who arrived there after spending three years in Russian captivity. She also penned this piece for The Guardian to accompany its release. 

Inside Forest Glade, soldiers might spend their days doing yoga, gardening, archery, or even caring for ponies. Light fills the corridors. Plants soften the harsh stone of the structure, and the rhythmic crack of striking billiard balls echoes constantly.

The calm site and its sounds are an early cue to soldiers that this place is different – in a good way. Savoskina describes seeing soldiers visibly relax as they arrived to join its routines of rest – a welcome interruption to wartime hypervigilance.

Some of that rehabilitation might seem outwardly soothing, like petting zoo visits, or time spent patiently looking after plants. But some of it is about experiencing stress – controlled and simulated, as opposed to the chaos of the front line.

Soldiers might fight with foam weapons and foam armour, go skiing or drive a go-kart, as forms of “controlled re-entry into environments that demand focus without mortal consequence.”

Archery is especially helpful in regulating the nervous system, Savoskina learned, as she tried it herself.

“Drawing the bow demands stillness,” she writes. “Breath must be regulated. The body has to anchor itself to the ground. You focus on a single point until everything else recedes. Archery becomes an exercise in reclaiming attention from intrusive memory. The body, disciplined and present, begins to counteract the mind’s reflex to scan for threat.”

In this private island of safety, soldiers receive well-rounded support, including medical, psychological, physical, and social care for an array of mental conditions, including stress, depression, anxiety, adjustment disorders, and PTSD.

It teaches soldiers what they have the power to change and what is beyond their control; even the predictable rhythms of the days become therapeutic. But, as Savoskina writes, “three weeks is an impossibly short period to address cumulative trauma.”

In other news…

ICE agents seized a man in a mental health crisis from his hospital bed in Minnesota. Adrian Sotelo Guzman, a Mexican citizen, was on a 72-hour psychiatric hold at M Health Fairview Southdale Hospital in Edina when ICE came to take him into custody. They moved him out of state, even though clinicians didn’t think he was stable enough to leave, according to court documents.

“This is a patient who was in active psychosis without decision-making capacity,” Jamey Sharp, a health care worker and advocate with Unidos MN told MPR News. “That means that this is someone who cannot advocate for themselves. Our understanding is that this is someone who didn’t even know who they are, where they are, or even what ICE was in the moment that they were discharged.”

Unidos MN has called for the hospital to be investigated for its actions regarding Sotelo Guzman’s case, with Sharp alleging that Sotelo Guzman was  smuggled out of back exits to prevent health care staff from seeing what was going on.

ICE agents had initially detained Sotelo Guzman on February 19, but, after witnessing concerning behavior, took him to Fairview Southdale, where hospital staff diagnosed him as experiencing acute mental illness. (Sotelo Guzman had been previously diagnosed with bipolar disorder.)

The hospital filed a petition to have him civilly committed on February 24, but US District Judge Daniel M. Traynor –  appointed to the federal bench during the first Trump administration – granted ICE’s request to transfer Sotelo Guzman out of Minnesota on February 26, just one day before his preliminary commitment hearing.

His legal team was able to confirm that he had been transferred to a behavioral health facility in El Paso, Texas, but he remains far away from family and without legal representation in the state – a problem Unidos MN is looking to resolve.

Fear of flying affects roughly 25 million Americans. A decades-old clinic at San Francisco International Airport is helping them face it. The Fear of Flying Clinic, founded in 1976 by a pair of pilots, helps anxious flyers gradually reframe their beliefs around air travel.

The four-day program  combines basic education about planes and flight taught by aviation experts – including pilots, air traffic controllers, and maintenance techs – with cognitive behavioral therapy techniques designed to interrupt the thought patterns that cascade an initial anxiety into full-blown panic.

Gradual exposure starts with a hangar visit and culminates in real commercial flights to Seattle and back, with volunteer support from the clinic on board. “ I’m feeling really safe on this flight,” participant Colette Vance told NPR on the first leg of her class’s final day. “I’m really hopeful that I’m gonna do way more of this.”