SJSU Spartan Mambo, the salsa dance team at San Jose State University, returned to the NBA stage on March 25 with a halftime performance at the Golden State Warriors game against the Brooklyn Nets.
The team performed in front of a Chase Center crowd as the Warriors battled back for a 109-106 win over Brooklyn, adding another major performance credit to the college team’s growing resume. The performance marked another high-profile appearance for the college team, and another sign of salsa continuing to show up on increasingly visible mainstream stages.
This latest appearance comes at a time when salsa is having a broader cultural moment. Just over a month earlier, Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl LX halftime show put salsa on one of the biggest stages in America, mixing Puerto Rican cultural imagery, live music and dance into a performance that reached a massive audience. In the weeks that followed, The New York Times reported that Bad Bunny’s recent work, especially “Baile Inolvidable,” was inspiring a younger generation of dancers to take salsa classes.
That context made Spartan Mambo’s Warriors performance feel especially timely.
The team’s 2026 halftime routine blended performance material with clear references to this current moment in salsa and pop culture. Spartan Mambo opened with “Mambo de la Luz”, the routine previously performed at the San Francisco SBK Congress last fall, then expanded it into a salsa medley with broader mainstream appeal. The full music lineup was:
- Mambo de la Luz, Orquesta de la Luz
- Die With a Smile, Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars
- Baile Inolvidable, Bad Bunny
- La Mudanza, Bad Bunny
One of the most topical moments came after “Die With a Smile,” when Spartan Mambo dancer Nicholas Urdaneta stood up and lip-synced Bad Bunny’s spoken interlude from the Super Bowl halftime show recording before the team transitioned into “Baile Inolvidable.” Urdaneta had also been featured in Super Bowl week coverage as a finalist in a San Francisco Bad Bunny lookalike contest, making the nod even more fitting.
Spartan Mambo performed the routine in blue and yellow costumes, matching both the Warriors’ colors and San Jose State’s own school colors. The team dances New York-style salsa On2, and brought 48 college dancers onto the floor for the performance.
The routine was choreographed by Takeshi Young, Dipanwita Ray, Alexis Ng, Piero Miranda, Carolina Sandoval-Bardo, Jesus Jimenez, and Isabel Landeros, combining work from the team’s coaches and student captains.
Founded in 2010, SJSU Spartan Mambo has spent years building a strong presence in the college salsa scene, and performances like this one show how student teams can help represent salsa at a high level in mainstream sports and entertainment spaces.
Spartan Mambo has performed for the NBA and the Golden State Warriors before, and this latest halftime appearance adds another chapter to that history. We previously covered another Warriors-related moment in Salsa dancers perform for NBA halftime shows.
At a moment when salsa is getting renewed visibility through artists like Bad Bunny, performances like this matter. They show that salsa is not just living in studios, congresses and social dance nights. It is also reaching college students, sports fans and wider mainstream audiences, one performance at a time.
