St. Cloud Fire Chief Matt Love Reacts to Setting the Dance Floor Ablaze and Raising $67,000 for the Public Safety Foundation

(KNSI) — A shocked St. Cloud Fire Chief Matt Love and his partner, Savanna Bain, burned up the dance floor and came out on top, waltzing away with more than $67,000 at Monday night’s Dancing With Our Stars event for the Public Safety Foundation.

Appropriately, their song was Adele’s Set Fire to the Rain, which Love explained has a special meaning. “We really wanted there to be a fire theme to go along with the Public Safety Foundation and what the cause was we were raising funds for.”

The money will be used by the foundation to advance women’s careers and promote leadership among their first responder ranks for emergency medical technicians, the police and fire departments.

Love was approached last year and agreed to dance before being asked to pinch hit as city administrator. He feared there would be no time to practice. “But quite frankly, it was a blessing in disguise working the two jobs of fire chief and interim city administrator doing dance practice was about the furthest thing from government work. And so it actually gave me a break a couple times a week.”

Love learned his body isn’t as young as it used to be. “The soreness the first month or two, you’re using muscles and things you’ve never used before [or] haven’t used them in a long time. So I had to change my workout routine and I had to really do things differently to get into the proper shape to be able to do all the lifts and all the moves that we chose to do.”

That wasn’t the toughest part. It was overcoming his two left feet and learning the dance. “We would rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. And then every evening, before I went to bed, I would try to visualize each move of the dance, trying to memorize it early. So in the long run it was just refining things.”

Love and Bain were the top fundraisers, earning an extra $15,000. They also received the Judge’s Award, piling another $3,000 onto their impressive total.

Love said the list of people to thank is endless, from all those who helped him prepare for the evening to everyone who helped raise money leading up to the event.

The Women’s Fund of Central Minnesota’s ninth annual “Dancing with Our Stars, Live!” event raised an impressive $300,132 for women and girls throughout the region.

___