It’s as if they anticipate the question that’s at the tip of your tongue when you see them, standing straight, tall, and ready to go in evenly spaced rows.

“Who are we?” a team captain cries.

“Mystery,” the rows reply in unison, breaking the word into three rhythmic syllables.

It’s a reference to the performing arts company that leads them, and, in that respect, is a perfectly adequate answer. But perhaps the better answer lies in the series of choreographed claps, slaps, and stomps that follow their words inside the gymnasium at Old West End Academy.

WATCH: Step team provides positive motivation

The students are a step team, and once a week after school they gather in the gym to perfect routines that require them to use their bodies to create intricate rhythms. They stomp their feet, clap their hands, slap their thighs, and hold stock-still in intentional pauses — to name just a handful of the steps that can make up a routine — in keeping with a performance style that has long been characteristic of historically black fraternities and sororities.

While stepping remains a standard on many college campuses, including the University of Toledo, where it’s spotlighted during an annual Jam Session organized by the National Pan-Hellenic Council and Multicultural Greek Council, it’s increasingly been filtering into high schools, middle schools, and elementary schools, too.

Brock Clark, founder and CEO of the New York City-based Youth Step USA, estimated that 5,000 youth teams across the country have introduced children and teenagers to the art of step.

“Youth stepping is something that’s very popular now,” Mr. Clark said. “It’s actually probably more popular than [it is] with the Greek fraternities and sororities.”

Locally, this trend has been spurred in large part by Toledo-based My5tery Music, an arts-to-academics company that leads a variety of after-school programs at contracting schools. Stepping is the most popular of the five performance-oriented programs, or “musical mysteries,” that Executive Director Errick Dixon offers as avenues to support at-risk students personally and academically.

The routines that students master demonstrate an impressive level of coordination, but Mr. Dixon, or “Mr. E” as his steppers know him, said it’s not so important to him that a child lands each step in perfect synchronization. He’s more interested in the big picture.

“We bring the students to five areas of focus: discipline, concentration, self-esteem, team-building, and, the most important one, confidence,” he said. “Once a child has confidence, they can do just about anything.”

Stepping traces its roots to Africa, where parallels can be drawn between the gumboot dances of South Africa, for example, to the contemporary step routines of fraternities and sororities on college campuses. Step Afrika!, a professional stepping company based in Washington that performed at Lourdes University in February, puts the origin of collegiate stepping as early as the 1900s.

Mr. Clark said stepping began to draw wider attention in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the “probate” shows organized by fraternities and sororities started to scale up.

“By the 1970s,” he said, “you started seeing actual competitions, where you would get actual promoters who would rent out halls and have these big Greek step shows.”

That’s around the time Mr. Clark got his own start in in New York City. Because stepping was still overwhelmingly collegiate at that point, he said, the first high school team to participate in one of his competitions stood out.

That was 1984. It wasn’t necessarily the first time that stepping had filtered into a high school, he said, but it would have been among the earliest examples.

Youth stepping has ballooned since then — even, Mr. Clark suggested, to the point where it might be more popular among children and teens today than it is among Greeks. Fraternities and sororities are still stepping, he said, but he’s also noticed a trend toward stroll, a cousin to step that he said is often more quickly and easily picked up by novices.

As step team facilitator for My5tery Music, Dionne Dixon, who is Mr. Dixon’s daughter, is responsible for putting together the routines that local step teams perform. While it’s important to respect fraternity and sorority traditions, she said, she also sees opportunities for younger participants.

“Anybody should be able to do it,” she said. “It’s fun. It’s a good way to stay in shape. And a lot of kids are curious and want to do it.”

Count Amaree Armstrong and Chanelle Henderson among those curious kids.

The seventh-grade students are captains of their step team at Old West End Academy, meaning they carry a few additional responsibilities. They might call out routines, for example, or step aside to slow down a step with a struggling classmate.

Each of the girls said her familiarity with stepping was pretty minimal before Mr. Dixon introduced it at their school. Chanelle, not unlike many of the youth steppers Mr. Dixon sees, said she primarily knew about step from a movie; in her case, it was Stomp the Yard.

“At first I was like, ‘What is this?’ Chanelle recalled. “I thought it was going to be difficult.”

But picking up a new skill proved pretty easy for Chanelle and for Amaree, who stepped in sync with their classmates during an afternoon practice. Likewise for seventh-grade classmate Jazarian Daniels, who, when asked about his favorite step, dropped a syncopated full-bodied rhythm without hesitation.

That fact that it’s complex makes it fun, he said.

Five local schools are home to a step team through My5tery Music this year: Old West End Academy, Academy of Educational Excellence, Rosary Cathedral Catholic School, Northpointe Academy, and Scott High School.

Northpoint Academy is the most recent addition, launching just this spring.

Each school will perform next month at My5tery Music’s Summer Cooler, an annual showcase that will highlight students participating in any of its programs. In addition to step, these programs, or mysteries, are drumline, pitched instrument training, vocal performance training and theatrical training.

The Summer Cooler is slated for 7:30 p.m. May 25 at the Ohio Theatre, 3106 Lagrange St. Tickets are available now through my5terymusic.com.

Each step team spends its weekly or twice-weekly practices building and polishing the routine that it will perform at Summer Cooler. But, despite the raucous stomps and claps that fill much of the duration of practices, Mr. Dixon said actually honing a craft is less important than supporting, encouraging, and pushing the students through that craft.

He and his daughter aim to change attitudes that might be holding students back “through a device that kids are attracted to.”

“Step,” he said, “is a big one.”

Seventh-grader Amirah Reed was among the students practicing a routine recently at Old West End Academy. She’s a much different stepper than she was three years ago when she joined, a testament to the way she’s already seen the team boost her confidence.

“I wanted to be at the back of the line, even behind the tall people, because I didn’t want anybody to see me, because I thought I was going to mess up the whole thing,” she recalled of her early days on the step team. “But then, later on, when we started doing more things and doing more performances, I noticed that even if I do mess up, it’s OK.

“All I have to do is keep trying.”

Contact Nicki Gorny at ngorny@theblade.com or 419-724-6133.

First Published April 8, 2018, 12:15 p.m.