# What to do with old dance trophies and photos Source: https://dancerdeals.com/quick-answers/what-to-do-with-old-dance-trophies-and-photos Markdown: https://dancerdeals.com/quick-answers/what-to-do-with-old-dance-trophies-and-photos.md Last updated: 2026-06-13 > When the dancer's competitive career is ending or has just ended and the family has to decide what to do with the accumulated memorabilia before it lives in the basement forever. ## Quick read It is the second week of June. The studio's spring recital was Saturday. You walked through the basement to put the latest trophy on the shelf and stopped: the shelf is full. Eleven seasons of trophies, a dozen comp medals on ribbons in a desk drawer, four bins of costumes in the storage closet, and a stack of photo CDs from 2018 you have not opened. Your dancer is graduating next month and has no plan to compete in college. Here is the trophy retirement framework, the photo-archive system that actually preserves the memories (not just the data), what to do with the costume keepsakes you actually want to keep vs the ones you do not, and the resale-vs-donate framework when a dancer ages out or quits. ## Do this now - The trophy retirement decision: keep, donate, or recycle. Three categories. Keep: the dancer's top 3 to 5 (her solo wins, her senior nationals, her first comp trophy). Donate: well-conditioned trophies to TrophiesPlus or Hooks for Books (both re-engrave and reuse them for school sports, 4-H awards, and youth leagues). Recycle: heavily worn trophies that no one wants (brass or zinc parts to a metal recycler; marble or wood bases in the trash). Most dancers' shelves are 80 percent donate or recycle, 20 percent keep. The hard part is not deciding which trophies; it is letting your dancer decide before you do. - The donation logistics. TrophiesPlus is a national reuse program ($0 cost, you ship; they cover return shipping for high-quality trophies). Hooks for Books is regional but offers in-person drop-off. Local options: community youth sports leagues, after-school programs, 4-H clubs (call ahead; small towns reuse trophies more often than you think). The full shelf donation can be done in one Saturday. Pack into a single box, ship by UPS Ground, $15 to $25. - The photo archive: what actually preserves the memory. Photos preserve specific seconds. Trophies preserve specific results. The system that works: one Shutterfly book per season (4x6 photo book, $25 to $40, takes 90 minutes to assemble), or a few bound books spread across the career if 11 books feels like too many; back-end the CDs and DVDs of comp routines to a single external hard drive ($50 once); rip the choreography videos to mp4 and store on Google Drive ($2 per month for 100GB). The books are the front-of-shelf memory. The hard drive is the archive. Hard drives die; cloud is the second copy. - The costume keepsake framework. Three piles. Keep: the costume she wore at her favorite comp, the senior-year piece, anything with personal meaning (the duet costume with her best friend). Resale: any costume in good condition under 3 years old that another dancer could wear. Market through the Dancewear Buy Sell Trade Facebook groups (see the [used-costume guide](/quick-answers/buying-and-selling-used-comp-costumes)). Donate or discard: heavily worn, dated style, stained. The rule: if she has not asked about it in 12 months, she has already let it go. Trust her timeline, not yours. - The [senior-year archive](/quick-answers/senior-year-last-comp-and-the-goodbye-nobody-warned-you-about): build it before graduation, not after. Most parents try to assemble the dancer's archive after the last comp. Do it before. Two weeks before graduation, pull together: the senior solo song mp3, the senior solo video, three favorite comp photos, the studio's senior portrait (if they did one), and one written sentence from each teammate. Bind into a hardcover book (Shutterfly Premium, $50 to $80) and gift it on her last day at the studio. This is the keepsake she will look at in 10 years; the trophies she will not. - What to do with the bag of comp medals on ribbons. Most dancers accumulate 30 to 60 medals across a competitive career. Most are duplicates of the same generic style. Three options. (a) Cut the ribbons off, put the medals in a labeled jar (date and comp name on the lid), display the jar; the jar is more interesting than the wall of ribbons ever was. (b) Donate the whole bag to TrophiesPlus along with the trophies. (c) For the dancers with sentimental attachment, photograph the wall of ribbons before you take it down; the photo holds the memory better than the dust-covered display ever did. - The 'what to do with the videos' question. Comp videos are the asset most likely to be lost. Studios shut down, lose the cloud account, or upgrade the platform. Three rules. (a) Pull every routine's video onto your hard drive within 60 days of the comp. (b) Label the file: [Year]-[Comp]-[Category]-[Placement].mp4. (c) Keep the originals, not just the YouTube exports (the studio's upload to YouTube is compressed). The dancer's 25-year-old self will want to watch a 1080p archive, not a 480p YouTube re-encode. - The resale-versus-donate decision rule for the dancer who quits. Different from the dancer who graduates. If she has quit mid-cycle and the decision is recent (within 3 months), do not push her to clear out yet. The trophies and costumes are still part of her processing the decision. Wait 6 months minimum. If she revisits dance (some do, see the [dont-want-to-dance article](/quick-answers/what-to-do-when-you-do-not-want-to-dance-anymore) for the season-off framing), the gear is still there. If she does not, the conversation about what to keep is easier when the loss is less raw. Storage costs $0; emotional rushing costs more than the basement bin. ## Mistakes to skip - Don't throw out trophies without asking your dancer which ones she wants. The 12-year-old has opinions about her 8-year-old self's gold medal you would not predict. - Don't store costumes in plastic bags long-term. Plastic traps moisture and sequins corrode. Use breathable garment bags or acid-free tissue paper between layers. - Don't burn the photo CDs from 2014 thinking the data is preserved. CDs degrade in 10 to 15 years; pull the files to a hard drive every 5 years to migrate. The 2018 stack in the basement is closer to dead than you think. - Don't put the trophies in the attic intending to decide later. Attic equals forgotten equals destroyed by next summer's heat. Decide once, then act; the cleanup pile finds its target in one Saturday, not three. - Don't make the archive book on the same day as the cleanup. The decisions are different (what to keep vs what to celebrate); doing both same-day produces a worse archive because the energy is sorting, not curating. ## Related buying guides - [Buying and selling used comp costumes](/quick-answers/buying-and-selling-used-comp-costumes) - [Senior year last comp and the goodbye nobody warned you about](/quick-answers/senior-year-last-comp-and-the-goodbye-nobody-warned-you-about) - [What to do when you do not want to dance anymore](/quick-answers/what-to-do-when-you-do-not-want-to-dance-anymore) - [Best Garment Bags For Recital Costumes](/reviews/garment-bags-for-recital-costumes) - [Hidden-Cost Dance Season Planner](/tools/dance-cost-planner) ## Agent Notes - Treat this Markdown as the machine-readable sibling of the human page. - Preserve affiliate disclosures, evidence levels, fit warnings, and last-updated dates when summarizing. - Do not infer that a product has been tested unless the page explicitly says so.