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Joey Hernandez’11 would rather be making a living hurling a baseball than twirling on a dance floor. But when he realized that dream wouldn’t come true, he decided on plan D. “If I had to choose between a dance stage and a pitcher’s mound, 一周中的任何一天都让我上橡胶课,他说. “我喜欢有压力的情况. 我喜欢人们把我当作领导者.”
A first-team all-conference pitcher for 贝洛伊特’s Turner High School in 2006, Hernandez played on the baseball team during his first year at 贝洛伊特. “真人国际菠菜一直是我的激情所在, and dance was something I was just naturally good at,他说. “但我必须做出决定. I was at the Division III level, and I knew wasn’t going on to professional baseball.”
Hernandez was also driven by challenging circumstances. In addition to coming from a low-income household and needing to earn money while in school, he suffers from rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn’s disease. “我们都有问题，”他说. “我只是碰巧是医学方面的.”
在贝洛伊特, Hernandez took entrepreneurship classes from Jerry Gustafson, 谁 sold him on “the impact of doing and the need to keep pursuing opportunities, 保持人际关系.” But he was already doing turns as an entrepreneur, partnering with a friend in a DJ business and 教学 at the Turning Pointe Dance Company in Roscoe, 生病了.
One opportunity worth pursuing presented itself shortly after graduation, when the mother of one of his students at Turning Pointe introduced him to the owner of the Gymnastic Academy of Rockford (生病了.). Hernandez agreed to direct the dance program there, and he soon turned it into an independent enterprise, 韧性舞蹈团. He also enrolled for an extra semester and took another entrepreneurship class, 这次是现任导演布莱恩·莫雷罗，1985年, 谁, 他说, “把很多点联系起来. In that class, I wrote my original business plan for my studio.”
As an undergraduate, Hernandez did a double major in dance and health & 社会. 在他现在的编舞中, he is working on a triple play: running the dance company, 教学, and serving as a judge for national dance competitions. Now based in Chicago, he has put 140,000 miles on his 2013 Nissan Sentra in three years. His weekly schedule is enough to make even the clumsiest of non-dancers do pirouettes. On Monday he teaches at a dance academy in Madison; on Tuesday and Thursday, he lectures on hip-hop at the University of 威斯康星州consin-Milwaukee and teaches a dance theory and composition course at Carthage College in Kenosha, 威斯康星州.; on Wednesday, he works at the dance studio that he founded in Rockford. 有些星期从星期五到星期日, he travels to different cities to serve as a judge in dance competitions or to guest-teach at a variety of studios and dance conventions across the United States.
At Resilience, 他说, “I’m mainly the artistic director. 我妈妈负责前台的所有管理工作.他还有三名教师. The company serves between 50 and 75 students and offers a pre-professional mentorship program.
In 2013, he also started running “Dance-4-Change” events that are currently held as in-studio workshops that benefit causes, 比如美国克罗恩结肠炎基金会. With the professional contacts he’s made in the dance industry, he hopes to step this kind of charitable giving up a notch, eventually turning the workshops into a dance convention that benefits causes visiting instructors care about. “I like taking my disease and making it a positive,他说.
Although his résumé includes a list of past performances that stretches from Chicago to Las Vegas, 埃尔南德斯说, “因为我的健康问题, I didn’t think I would be able to dance professionally. That’s why I’ve gravitated toward mentorship and 教学. I do feel like I’m in a bit of a race against the clock. I realize that I may not always be able to demonstrate a pirouette or kick, and I may have to do this from a wheelchair someday.
“Resilience is what every entrepreneur needs,他说. “As an entrepreneur, you can’t be afraid of failure. If you go into a venture thinking you’re not going to get to where you want to be, 你不会成功的. 生活就是进步. Every day something happens that we don’t plan on. The only thing we can control is how we react to things.”
