— Michelle Knight’s Diamond Line team had just finished its routine at the Showtime Regional competition at Rouse High School last year. After the awards ceremony — where the squad was named Grand Champion — Knight went to pick up the score sheets from judges when she received the news.

The team sat waiting patiently as Knight bounded up the steps of the bus and faced the 40-something high school girls, ready to share their scores. She told them how proud they should be of their performance, how grateful she was for all their hard work.

And then Knight told them they’d just qualified for nationals.

“We just immediately started screaming, like high school girls do,” Rachel Wheaton, junior at San Marcos High School and first lieutenant on the squad, said. “We’d never been offered anything like that in our entire lives. We were all just completely blown away.”

Captain Brittany Natal remembers simply feeling blessed.

“I wasn’t scared at all,” Natal said. “We work so hard every day, it just felt right. I felt like it was destined that we would perform somewhere bigger.”

For the first time in its history, the San Marcos High School Diamond Line Dance Team will represent its school and its city when it travels to the Showtime National Drill Team Contest March 26-27 at the Moody Gardens Convention Center in Galveston. The team is reveling in a level of support from others on campus usually reserved for Friday night football.

“I don’t think that any organization on this campus has competed at a level like this,” Knight, the Diamond Line director and dance teacher, said. “I’ve had students coming in congratulating us and teachers e-mailing me about it. My kids really feel special because everyone has really noticed our accomplishment.”

The Diamond Line will perform a total of nine numbers in Galveston: Four officer routines (jazz, novelty, lyrical and contemporary) and five team routines (pom, jazz, lyrical, novelty and modern), dancing on their biggest stage yet. The team is led by Captain Natal; Wheaton as First lieutenant; Justin Campos as Senior Officer and Chelsea Casner as Junior Officer.

Knight, a San Marcos High School graduate, is in her third year of direction over the Diamond Line. A dance teacher for 15 years, she started the dance program at Goodnight Middle School in 2000.

And she knew she had something special with the current group of dancers.

“(Last year) with the talent of my team coming up, I thought I could push them. My kids were ready for something else to be challenged by,” Knight said.

At the beginning of its daily practices, the team lines up on the floor at the corner of the SMHS gym, next to the athletic hallway and locker rooms meanwhile Knight climbs to the top of the bleachers to have the same perspective as the judges.

Natal leads the team in prayer. And seconds before they enter  the floor and their routine begins, the officers remind the dancers: “OK guys, it’s nationals. Here we go.” They’ve also adopted a slogan: “If you don’t believe, you don’t belong.”

“Every day we talk about being one team and one dream,” Natal said. “That’s what the Diamond Line is all about.”

And as they move forward, their director has no doubts about Galveston.

“I would never have signed them up for nationals if I didn’t think they’d succeed,” Knight said. “They’ve got this different work ethic about them: It’s all about bringing home that national title.”

And if they did? Wheaton says it might just be the best feeling in the world: Certainly the highlight of the students’ high school careers.

“In high school you think local. You don’t think about nationals,” Wheaton said.