‘Dancing With the Stars: Juniors’ Pair Earns First Standing Ovation of the Season

Mackenzie Ziegler and Sage Rosen are making Dancing With the Stars: Juniors history, earning the first standing ovation from the judges in the ABC series’ history.

The singer and Dance Moms alum and her pro partner (mentored by Gleb Savchenko) took on the quickstep to the 2004 song “Are You Gonna Be My Girl?” by Jet for the “Year I Was Born” themed week earning them a score of 24/30 from the judges as the first dance of the night.

The spirited performance was enough to bring judge and Dancing With the Stars pro Val Chmerkovskiy to his feet.

“This might be premature, but I gotta do that [give a standing ovation], because I was really tough on you last week,” Chmerkovskiy told the stunned pair. “This is exactly why I was tough on you, because you totally killed it.”

He continued, “That was incredible, there was a lot of confidence in your movement. Keep it up. That’s what I expect from you.”

La La Land choreographer and fellow judge Mandy Moore also praised the couple. saying, “I don’t know what you did this week, but you definitely are your dance cereal, because you are a new girl this week. What happened?”

She added, “That was setting the bar super high this week, good job.”

Even Dancing With the Stars: Athletes winning judge Adam Rippon was impressed. “The critique last week was that we wanted more content and you 100 percent delivered on that,” he admitted.

DWTS: Juniors fans on Twitter were equally impressed.

“Yas Mackenzie. #DWTSJuniors,” one fan wrote.

“THEY SNAPPED! So proud of #TeamGleb,” another echoed.

“Wow, [Mackenzie] is such a good dancer,” a third marvelled.

But will the team be able to take this momentum all the way to the end of the season? Only time will tell.

Dancing With the Stars: Juniors airs Sundays at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.

Photo credit: ABC/Eric McCandless