This Saturday the Maungatapu Cowgirls will be centre-stage at Baycourt, representing their school at the JUMP JAM North Island Regional Competition.

They will be competing against several hundred students from across the North Island in the largest primary school aerobic competition held in New Zealand.

Coach Paula Thomason says her group of 12 girls are competing in the Open section.

'There's three different sections in the JUMP JAM challenge: Novice, Open, and Advanced Open,” she explains.

'We didn't participate in the challenge last year, but we were still able to enter the Open section this year, which is a huge accomplishment.

'We received very high scores in our video entry – we've got an amazing team of cowgirls.”

The name comes from their routine, which is set to the Steps song ‘5, 6, 7, 8'.

'It has a real line dancing feel,” says Paula.

JUMP JAM is a primary school aerobics fitness programme created 16 years ago Brett Fairweather, twice World Aerobic Champion, eight times New Zealand Aerobic Champion. Over 515,000 schoolchildren participate in the programme in more than 2000 primary schools across the country.

'I've been running JUMP JAM at the school for about eight years,” says Paula.

'We have auditions at the end of Term One for any students interested in being part of the year's team. We then work towards the video entry for the national competition, and once we've found out how we've gone in that, we focus on the November competitions.”

She says the team have been working hard, and hopes it will pay off tomorrow.

'I'm really impressed with what they've put together.”

And here's the classic Steps song the Cowgirls will be performing to: