Mark Ballas is not the star.

He's the dancer charged with launching a star - Olympic figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi - toward reality-TV glory on Dancing With the Stars.

So far the 21-year-old Houston native has made it into the quarterfinals of the ABC program - an achievement, after Ballas and Cheetah Girl Sabrina Bryan made an early exit last season, his first on the show. If he and Yamaguchi don't get voted off the dance island tonight, they just might win it all.

And then what? (Besides the mirror-ball winner's trophy, that is.)

Well, that's unclear. American Idol aims to give young talent a shot at their rock 'n' roll fantasy, but Dancing With the Stars has no such pretensions.

It's unlikely that Yamaguchi, a mother and former Olympic champion, will launch a second career in ballroom dance. At least, no previous winners have quit their day jobs to cha-cha for a living.

But will winning do anything for Ballas' career?

"I think it will," said Ballas' father, Corky Ballas. "I think maybe it could give him some notoriety."

The truth is that most ballroom dancers waltz their way through a career in relative obscurity.

Take Corky Ballas. The guy's a hall-of-famer in the dance world, so to speak. He was born and raised in Houston, where he started his career. He moved to England, an epicenter of the ballroom-dance world and where Mark was mostly raised. Corky Ballas has won a long list of dance-champion titles and is considered a Latin dance expert.

He trained not only his son but many other dancers, including Dancing With the Stars professionals Julianne and Derek Hough, brother-and-sister dancers.

But unless you live in a household of ballroom dancers, Ballas is hardly a household name.

Yvonne Kubicek, president of the Houston Chapter of USA Dance, a national organization for amateur dancers, knows of Ballas but has a hard time listing the top ballroom dancers in the country right now.

"I'm very avid, and even I don't know," she admitted.

For dancers like Kubicek, ballroom dancing is a beloved, time- and money-consuming hobby. Though she has been dancing about three times a week for 20 years, Kubicek never once expected to become the next Ginger Rogers.

"I think most people understand that stardom is not the goal," she said.

The glittery costumes and spray-on tans can't mask the fact that professional ballroom dancing is hard work, Corky Ballas said. It requires traveling the country and the world to teach and compete. It demands years of training, often from a young age. It means hours of rehearsal with a partner in preparation for competitions witnessed mostly by a ballroom of dance insiders. Like any athletic competition, it can wreak havoc on a body.

In other words, the reality show is no preparation for reality.

"When you are competing for real in our world, doing Dancing With the Stars would take you off your game," Ballas said.

The benefits to Dancing with the Stars, then, may not be for dancing.

Some of the "stars" of the show have used their appearances to lift sagging careers. For the professionals, the show makes them popular names for dance studios across the country to hire for workshops and coaching. Mark Ballas has already had such offers, his father said.

Julianne Hough, who won Dancing twice in a row with partners Olympic skater Apolo Anton Ohno and race-car driver Helio Castroneves, will release a country-music album this month and is expected to tour with singer Brad Paisley.

It's a path Mark Ballas, her one-time dance partner, would like to follow, his father said.

"I would like to see Mark do what Mark wants to do," he said, "and he wants to write music and sing for a living."