European Tournament for Dancing Students

The tournament is held twice a year, once during the Pentecost weekend and once in autumn. The event always starts on a Friday evening and ends on the following Monday morning. Although each ETDS is organised by a different party, the structure remains fairly constant: on Friday evening, the blind date program takes place, in which dancers without a partner can try to find someone with which to compete in one or both dance disciplines. Blind dating is also a motivation for some dancers that want to meet new people. On Saturday, the ballroom tournament for the breitensport class (German, meaning amateur sports for the masses) takes place and the Latin-American tournament for the open class as well as, if so chosen by the organising party, for the CloseD class. On Sunday, all classes dance the respective other discipline. The event ends on Monday with a last common breakfast.

The organisation of each tournament is in the hands of a different participating university. The tournament takes place in the city of the organising university, the location changing every half year to another European city. So far, the tournament has taken place most of the times either in Germany or the Netherlands. In autumn 2015, the ETDS took place in Czech Republic, breaking that series for the first time. With the participation of some students from South Africa, it also premiered hosting dancers from outside Europe.

Although the primary focus of the ETDS lies in organising a tournament of high standards, the event equally aims at creating a social happening where dancers from all of Europe can meet each other. This is encouraged by the possibility to blind date and by a themed festival ("motto party") on the event's Saturday evening and a gala ball on Sunday evening.

The sleeping accommodation is commonly a local gym.

The ETDS was founded by the university dance teams of Clausthal, Braunschweig and Kiel, who agreed to get to know each other during a tournament. The event was organised by these three German universities for a number of times. There was not a regular structure, but the tournament was organised ad hoc. Finding a sleeping accommodation was easy, as the number of participants was still very low.

In November 1990, a tournament prize was introduced that has been used ever since, “der tanzmaus” (German for “the dance mouse”), a pluche mouse. The tanzmaus was a donation of the university of Kiel; Clausthal was the first university to win the mouse. It is given to the winning university which "hosts" the prize until the next ETDS.

In December 1991, a tournament during Sinterklaas took place. The tournament gained more participants and Berlin started participating as well. Berlin won the dance mouse during this Sinterklaas tournament, and promised to organise the event somewhere in the future. During this tournament, only one class existed.

In April 1992, the tournament took place in Clausthal. This was the first tournament in which the team of Dortmund started participating. Some tournaments later, Ulm and Marburg started participating as well.

The University of Berlin fulfilled their promise in 1993 by taking care of the organisation of the tournament. The tournament still did not have separate classes.

The next tournament took place in the spring of 1994, and the tournament gained in popularity; fifteen universities from Germany participated. Also, for the first time, universities from the Netherlands started to participate. The new universities were from Mainz, Geisenheim, Kaiserslautern, Delft and Eindhoven.

During autumn of 1994, the number of participants had increased to such a high amount that problems started to arise between the organisation and the administration of Kiel. The result was that Kiel was disallowed to organise the event for five years.

The next tournament took place in the spring of 1995, and for the first time, the tournament was separated into two classes. They were called “amateurs” and “profis” ("professionals"). Leipzig also joined this tournament.

The tournament that was held in the summer of 1995 was the first event to take place in the Netherlands. The organisation was in the hands of ESDV Footloose from Eindhoven. Groningen joined during this tournament. From now on, the ETDS was no longer organised on an ad hoc basis, but was organised regularly twice each year, during Pentecost and in the autumn, each time by a different university.

The number of participants continued to grow, and around 2004 a third class, "masters", was added to the breitensport section. More than 500 participants took part in the 41st tournament in Groningen in May 2009, and another breitensport class by the name of “champions” was introduced.

The event continued to grow in popularity, and 570 participants were competing in the 47th edition during Pentecost, May 2012. In October 2015, the event was held for the first time in the Czech Republic, in the city of Brno. This was the first ETDS not organised in Germany or the Netherlands.

Every ETDS organisation is allowed to make their own rules for the tournament. Each organisation describes rules about clothing and the calculation of the tanzmaus evaluation. Because the focus of each organization may be different, the balance between social orientation and competition changes slightly. Nevertheless, several rules exist during each tournament:

Every European university or student dance society can participate. In practice, a majority of the participants is German. The second largest participating party is from the Netherlands, and some dancers from the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Estonia, Norway and other neighbouring countries participate as well.

The record for the most teams participating in an ETDS was set at 54th ETDS Brno, where 37 teams from 11 countries took part. This was the first participation for the teams from Crimea/Ukraine, Lublin/Poland, Winterthur/Switzerland and Cape Town/South Africa.

• European Tournament for Dancing Students - Website of the most recent organisation