The Clippers held their final Spirit audition at the Spectrum Club in El Segundo this past evening. Since I was out of town this past weekend, I wasn’t able to make the initial audition on Saturday :(. Unlike last season’s audition, members of the new team were not announced afterwards. The 35 beautiful and talented finalists will have to wait until this Friday to see who makes the 2008-2009 Spirit Dance Team, which will be announced on Clippers.com.

The audition was intense yet fun. It was certainly super awesome to see a few familiar faces from the past two seasons, as well as some new ones that will be be part of the upcoming season’s team :). I’d like to thank the Spirit staff members, especially Audrea, for giving me the opportunity to document this event again. Here are just a few of the several hundred photos I took earlier tonight. Be sure to check the Spirit homepage for more photos and announcement of the new team! I’ll try and update this post with some action shots of the winners this Friday. Until then, enjoy these shots…

We took a few, quick profile shots of every finalist before starting the audition. Note: pardon the really bad, tunsten/fluorscent-cast in some of the images – it’s just nearly impossible to get properly (white) balanced-shots inside the Spectrum gym, and I’m a bit too lazy to fix it in post-production right now :). Want to take a guess on which 16 makes the team?

Some pre-audition warm-ups:

A few big-picture views of what took place inside the gym:

Finally, a few familiar faces from last season :).