Dance makes it to the major leagues 

Dance majors rejoice: You can finally call your dad and tell him that his dreams are "wildly impractical and upsetting grandma."

A professional dance league is launching soon, and a new career path is coming with it.

The founder of STEEZY, an online dance class platform, closed a $7m seed round to start The International Dance League (IDL), a professional association for dancing as a sport. 

Here's how it'll work:

• The league will start with six teams, representing cities across four continents. 
• Teams will operate like NBA franchises with contracts, salaries, seasons, and rivalries.
• IDL events will be full-blown spectacles with professional judges, DJs, halftime shows, and smaller showcases for local dance troupes.

Dance is a notoriously unreliable line of work — even the first dancers depicted in 9k-year-old cave paintings probably had reservations about pursuing a career in it over hunting or gathering.

The IDL is trying to challenge that by establishing a clearer career trajectory for dancers. 

Sports leagues usually have some kind of talent development pipeline (Little League to college to minors to pros). Dance doesn't. 

That makes the IDL an interesting case study: a sport being built in reverse, starting with a professional league and figuring out talent-sourcing as it goes. 

What's in it for investors?

Though the IDL is still hashing out player development, dance has an established audience. The league's big draws are that base of interested spectators and its potential for virality. 

STEEZY's network of instructors has 150m+ followers, and dance content often performs well on TikTok (if you didn't know). 

Still, the IDL faces unique challenges. Other professional leagues have successfully capitalized on viral trends and activities, like the PPA Tour for pickleball and the ACL for cornhole.

But they didn't have to standardize rules for an artistic medium, promote teams across multiple continents, and build a talent development pipeline — tall asks, but if the IDL pulls them off, it could make dance careers more viable and inspire more dreamers to pursue them.