Leilani Kiana Bedania was in a bathroom stall in Sydney, Australia, when she found out she was famous.

"I came out of the stall, and someone was like, 'Oh my God, are you Leilani? I love GRV,'" she said, still sounding a little stunned about it months later. "I was like, what? Australia? I made it out there. I was in the bathroom right now, but yeah. I was not expecting it that far away."

That is roughly the year the International Dance League has given the dancers inside it. The IDL, founded by the team behind the online dance platform STEEZY, is the first global professional dance league built on a traditional sports model: six pro teams under contract, numbered jerseys, a points-based regular season across five international events, and one championship at the end of it. The six franchises are Brotherhood (Vancouver), Quick Style (Oslo), Jam Republic (Southeast Asia), Royal Family (Auckland), 1MILLION (Seoul), and GRV, representing Los Angeles.

The league is heading to Los Angeles on September 19 and 20 for the LA Series and Final Championship event.

Two of the dancers wearing GRV's jersey for this inaugural season came up through San Diego.

Bedania started dancing at four or five, doing jazz and studio styles before her dad, a dancer himself back in the day, pushed her toward hip hop classes. She fell in love with it immediately and has been dancing for about 15 or 16 years since, cycling through team after team in San Diego before she moved north for college. She's now at Cal State Fullerton, living in Orange County, and building a choreography career on top of a full academic schedule.

Kaylar Preite's start was even earlier, and not entirely her decision. "Before I was even born, my mom already knew that she was gonna put me in some type of performance avenue," she says. "Dance, theater, singing. She just had the idea." At three, Preite was in classes at a studio in Lemon Grove. She was a studio kid doing jazz, tap, drill team, all of it, until she found hip hop at Culture Shock in Point Loma and joined their junior competition team, where she stayed six or seven years. When she aged out at 18, she started directing that same junior team, joined the San Diego adult competition team 220, and directed a high school competition team at Torrey Pines, all more or less at once.

"I kind of just kept trying to keep my foot in the community while also branching out with teams and trying to do other things at the same time," she said.

Those other things got big. Preite joined Beyond Babel, the off-Broadway show from Keoni and Mari Madrid, and did a few seasons of it while living in New York. Then COVID shut Broadway down and sent her home. "It was kind of like, okay, so what? What now?" She moved to Los Angeles in 2022 to chase commercial and industry work, which is where GRV finally caught her.

The GRV thing had been a slow-motion near-miss for years. David Lim, who directs the team, used to teach in San Diego, and Preite would take his classes in high school. He'd invite her to auditions; the team was rehearsing in Orange County, too far to make work. "It was like playing cat and mouse over the years," she says. "He'd be like, 'Hey, we're having auditions,' and I'm like, 'Oh, I'm moving to LA.'"

Then came the IDL launch event last year, and one more message. "It's low commitment right now,” recalled Lim. “It's just for a launch event. They're talking about a 2026 season, but we're not sure. But I would love to bring you in and have you be a part of the team." Preite said yes. "From there, it was like a match made in heaven."

Bedania's route in was different but just as San Diego. Growing up, she competed against GRV's junior team, the Gravy Babies, and idolized them. By the time she moved to Orange County she was over 18 and aged out of the juniors, and she'd more or less promised herself she was done joining teams. GRV changed her mind with its legacy (the team hits 20 years in 2027), the opportunities, and one specific goal.

"I think that was my biggest goal, moving up here, growing as a choreographer," she said. "I feel like choreographing and being on GRV would help push that. And I can say from my two years being on the team, it's definitely put me out there more. Getting to showcase my work, and dance with my friends, and have my friends dancing all of my choreo too. It's honestly just so fun."

Both of them landed on the launch event cast, and both got a jolt from where things went next. For Bedania, who was one of GRV's newest dancers at the time, it was pure pressure. "I was just like, I don't know how I ended up here, but I'm just gonna push." For Preite, it turned into the captaincy, an assignment that made her proud and nervous in equal measure, since she was one of only two dancers in that cast without GRV history.

"I'm still playing catch up to almost two decades worth of processes that they've done," she says. "I still haven't done all of it, but I'm working through it every single time." What she wanted her teammates to take from the title had nothing to do with rank. "The one thing I just wanted my teammates to know is that I would always be a voice for them, whether I've been here for a year or 10 years. I want them to see 'captain' and know that's just someone I can go to, and less of 'this is someone I should be looking up to' in terms of dance."

Here's how the season they signed up for actually works. Each Series features rotating matchups so every team eventually faces every other team. In Round One, three head-to-head matches are decided by six judge votes and one live audience vote, with performances scored across ten categories split between Design and Execution. Winners advance to Round Two. Points from all five Series stack into the season standings, and those standings set the bracket at the Championship, where the first seed draws the sixth, the second draws the fifth, and the third draws the fourth. Three winners move to a final round, and one set decides a world champion.

The season opened May 2 at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York, then ran through Vancouver, Sydney, and Seoul. In July, the league signed its first media rights deal, putting events on ESPN2, ESPN+, and the ESPN app.

For anyone who wants a single set to start with, both dancers picked the same one without hesitation: GRV's Round One in Sydney.

Bedania choreographed sections of it. "That was my first time I was able to really dive into the process and pour more of myself into the creative aspect of the team," she says. "That one is just really special to me, and also because we were able to 7–0 our opposing team."

Preite calls it the team's baseline. "That was our first time getting to Round Two this season, which was great for a personal goal for us. Going into that Sydney series, I think that was the most comfortable we felt going into a set, and I think that translated so well on the stage, and also translated in the judging." She'd pair it with GRV's Vancouver Round One — the demon set against Brotherhood, with the masks and the red rubber bands. "That just felt like our most grand performance of the season, because we really tried to push the envelope in every single avenue against Brotherhood, rightfully so, because we knew they were going to push it right back. And they did."

Sydney also produced Bedania's favorite non-dance memory of the year, and it happened before the team had danced a single count. They walked out of the airport to find fans already lined up waiting for them. "I literally felt like an athlete at that moment. I felt like, wow, this is so huge."

Feeling like an athlete gets at one of the reasons the league was founded: to settle the question of whether dance is a sport. Ask either of them whether dance is a sport, and you get a very fast answer.

"I feel like people are hesitant about it because dance is so subjective," Bedania says. "Everyone has their own experiences and opinions on how to format a whole dance set and how to grade them. But I also think not only can dance be a sport, I think it's also an art form." She played basketball before she danced, which gives her a comparison. "I would say dance is way more demanding, and it's just a lot more on my body. Other sports, their max is maybe three to four hours. But for us dancers, we can go up until nine to 12 hour days, even more."

Preite frames it as a daily choice. "You have two great football players, and you have one that wakes up at four a.m. to start training. You have one that sleeps in until noon and takes his time. They can both be great, but it's that four a.m. choice that could push you a little more." She's been making that trade her whole life. "They had to miss school for their practices or games. I had to miss school for competitions or rehearsals. It's always been a parallel thing for me."

Bedania is currently running that math in real time. She scheduled her fall classes around GRV rehearsals, which means night classes for the first time and days that don't end until 9:45 at night. "It's been a battle and a struggle," she says. "I'm just gonna have to learn and figure out how I'm gonna be able to balance all my schoolwork and all the rehearsals and also just taking care of my body, because it's a lot."

One of the more interesting things Preite has been chewing on all season is what the league should actually call itself, stylistically, and what it owes.

"I view IDL as an open choreography competition or an open style dance competition," she says. "A lot of things that teams will bring are definitely a part of hip hop styles and a lot of Black culture styles, but there's also an element to it that is following where dance is evolving into in these different genres and how much we've taken and adapted into hip hop so far."

Calling it strictly a hip hop competition, she argues, would flatten six teams whose training, teachers, and demographics are genuinely different. "It's great to see teams from Norway doing Lite Feet, which is a New York style, and that's so cool to see them have an understanding of it that is so different from ours. You see them hit those marks that's needed to call it that hip hop style. But it's also a part of their set, so it's great to have that notice and then also see their uniqueness and individuality for the rest of the set, or else we'd all become carbon copies of hip hop styles over and over again."

The foundation isn't up for debate, though. "I mean, dance would be nothing without Black culture and hip hop styles, and so I feel like to be in a pro team, you definitely need to have an understanding of that as a baseline." Her read is that the balance will keep shifting as the league matures. "I feel like we'll see a lot of back and forth, especially as the league grows and as the criteria for judging grows. That will be something each team will definitely need to look at."

The thing both dancers keep circling back to, though, is the team itself.

"It really does feel like I have 19 other siblings, and we're all just trying to make it to summer camp," Preite says. Twenty dancers who see each other constantly could easily grind on one another. Instead, on off days, someone's texting the group about going to the beach. "We know each other's nighttime routines at this point." She joined during a stretch when her mom and dad were in and out of the hospital, and says the reason she stayed was the people. "It definitely feels like home being with them, and it was something I didn't expect for where my career was."

For Bedania, the person who made all of it possible isn't in the room. Her dad drove her to Los Angeles for a team in West Covina, took her everywhere, and was her loudest fan. He passed away in 2020, in the middle of the COVID shutdown, and for a while she lost the thing they'd shared.

"That's how we bonded," she said. "There was a moment where I kind of stopped and questioned if I keep going. But I'm honestly really glad that I kept dancing. I felt that's something he would have wanted me to keep doing." She thinks about what he'd make of the league. "Oh my gosh, he would probably go nuts about this right now. I wish he was here seeing it and experiencing it." The thing that keeps her pushing, she says, is him.

Now comes the part they've both been counting down to. GRV's home stand lands September 19 at the Shrine Expo Hall in Los Angeles for Series 5, with the Community Division at 6 p.m. and the Pro Division at 7:30 p.m. PDT, followed by the Championship at the same venue on September 20.

The standings going in are not comfortable. Brotherhood has won all four Series and sits at 56 points, undefeated. 1MILLION is second with 28, Royal Family third with 22, and GRV fourth with 15. Jam Republic (14) and Quick Style (9) are close enough to make the final regular-season event matter enormously for seeding.

"Obviously, it's not the position we want to be in," Bedania says, "but I know that in this next event, I feel confident that we can get our points up. We just know we can't let our hometown down."

Two events in one weekend is double the workload in the same window, and Preite is clear-eyed about the fatigue. "I know all teams are tired. We're all pushing to get to that finish line together." But she'd rather have this pressure than the last four Series' worth. "This is our home. This is our most comfortable. We don't have to fly early and get used to jet lag. This is a chance for the external challenges to be less."

GRV's extended family, affectionately called the G Fam, is at least 200 people, and Preite says they've been up at three in the morning watching all season. "There's a sense of pride that we have going into it, and just a lot of wanting to make our city proud. No matter what the results are, we want to have a product on that stage that not only we're proud of, but the people who support us are proud of too."

For Bedania, the weekend in Los Angeles has a specific weight: the room will be full of people who were stepping stones in her dance journey, watching her do this professionally.

The pitch to anyone who hasn't watched a set yet belongs to Preite. "Watch. Your perception of dance is and will be changed. Even with me having been dancing for the majority of my life, for 25 years, I still didn't even think that dance could be pushed to this caliber."

There's a version of that pitch aimed at people who don't dance at all, too. "Someone's grandpa could love it, love their team, or the niece who just sees their favorite color orange, and that's their favorite team. There's always something entertaining for anyone."

Bedania has a simpler goal for the weekend, and for whatever the league becomes after it. "I'm just hoping to keep doing IDL," she says, "and be the athlete that they want us to be glorified as."