Color Guard Rehearsal Structure for Success!

Instructors often tell me that they don't have enough time in rehearsal to really max out their students. They often wish for longer rehearsal blocks, more togetherness time with the team, and more control over the schedule. Every type of rehearsal schedule has its pros and cons, so here is a little bit about what we do at Spintronix that helps us out.

Location

We are one of the luckiest guards in the world because we have our own personal space. We can set up our rehearsal times without worrying about anyone else's practice schedule besides our own. That being said, this is an incredibly rare situation and you will need to be ready for all kinds of things when booking a rehearsal location. Chances are, it will be very difficult to get into a gym for every single rehearsal. Even when you do book a gym, a lot of times basketball teams are not terribly organized about recording their bookings and you will have a team come in anyway. Make sure you know and are on friendly terms with your coaches so that if this does happen, you can smooth over the situation with as few hurt feelings as possible.

What to teach...

Once you have location(s) booked, figure out what will be the best parts of your program to teach in the spaces that you have. Maybe you can get some dance studio time and only work on dance technique and choreography during those rehearsals. Maybe you can get some time in a local community center where you can spin, but the ceilings aren't quite high enough for tossing. Deciding ahead of time what you will teach during the rehearsal time is paramount to getting it done.

Block length vs. Breaks

Keeping students engaged for long stretches of time can be tough; they are young and full of energy, their minds wander, and they have an insatiable need for social time! If you get a long amount of time for a rehearsal (like an 8-hour Saturday) keep the breaks no more than two hours apart. However, getting students prepared and having a full rehearsal can take some time, so if you have to have shorter rehearsals daily during the week 1.5-2 hours is a good time frame to work with.

Planning Ahead

This is the number one downfall of SO MANY instructors I know, and the number one best quality of so many OTHER instructors I know... It's the thing that separates the good instructors from the great ones. Plan ahead. The best way that I have personally found I can do this is by making measurable goals. Example: my goal for this weekend's rehearsal is to teach the entire flag feature. Then maybe my goal for next weekend's rehearsal will be to get the entire flag feature clean. This will help you with timing everything in your rehearsals so that you aren't rushing to cram education into your students' brains but you also aren't experiencing a lot of down time.

Inform the Staff

If you have multiple people on your staff, make sure they all know the plan for each rehearsal as well. Things like what time to be there, what they are teaching, how much time they have to teach it, and especially what your goal for the rehearsal is. If you have your entire staff communicating well and planning ahead together, you will become an unstoppable force and a great example for your team.

Good skill and good luck to all of you and your teams this season!

<3 Jackie

Habits - Reprinted with Permission

Ever notice that when things are going well all of the "good for you" things, such as reading, writing, eating healthy, taking vitamins, counting calories, exercising, etc. are really easy to do? But then when things are "going bad" you have a really hard time keeping up with your normal good habits? This keeps happening to me... When times are easy, it is easy to take care of myself mentally and physically, but as times get hard then I let go of some of those things that I should do all the time. This is sort of one of those things that makes me spiral downward out of control and into a crazy depression of sorts.

Not that I am a depressed person, don't get me wrong! It's also not that being a depressed person is something I frown upon because I don't... Depression is a very tough battle but I have found my own way to fight through it; cling to the things that help me the most. When I get stressed out, I need to keep better track of what I eat just so I can KNOW without a doubt that I am avoiding things that might make me sick or depressed. I also need to read more, especially read inspirational and self-help items, so I can find the inspiration in them. I need to write more, so I can get all of my thoughts out and sorted and look at them with a resh perspective instead of just seeing them all jumbled up in my head. I am also a HUGE culprit of allowing myself to miss out on sleep to get work done... That's the number one no-no in dealing with stress and battling depression!

A friend of mine recently imparted this story to me concerning the amount we take care of ourselves and I would like to also share it with you. There was a man who needed to cut down five large trees before it got dark outside. He pulled out his saw, cut down the first tree, and it only took him about five minutes. The second tree was a little bit more difficult, it took closer to twenty minutes to cut down because the saw was growing dull. After the third tree took nearly an hour, the man thought about stopping to sharpen his saw, but with darkness approaching quickly he decided he didn't have the time to stop so he continued onto the fourth tree. After an hour, darkness was well upon the land and the man had only sawed about halfway through. His wife came outside looking for him and found him fruitlessly rubbing the dull blade against the tree and stopped him to come in for dinner. He reluctantly agreed, and while he was eating, the wife took five minutes to sharpen his saw blade. When the man returned to the tree the next morning, he finished the fourth tree and the fifth tree in a total of seven minutes.

The moral of the story; don't sacrifice efficiency for amount of work!

J.M. Hope

Getting Good Things to Happen in Color Guard

You never know when something good is going to happen until it happens to you. Spintronix was that something for me. I joined as a first time staff member this year and it has been the most rewarding job I could ever hope for. The kids are amazing! I love coming down every weekend to see each and every one of them! It’s the family I never knew I needed until I had it.

One particular weekend in December, Merideth was down to teach some choreography and out of the blue she asked me how old I was (22 by the way). She asked me for my exact birthday, then proceeded to look at Jackie and say “I think she can march this year...”. After checking the rule book the next day, it turned out it was true and Jackie let me decide what I wanted to do! Needless to say, I jumped at the opportunity! Never having marched DCI or winter guard, I wasn't going to pass on my one and only opportunity. We kept it from all the kids for a week and I let Jackie break the news to them the next rehearsal weekend. They were all just as excited for me and I loved all the support I received from them. This will be my rookie and age out year, but I am so happy to have this chance. It was truly a dream come true for me and I can't wait to see what the rest of the season holds for me as a performer!

This past weekend, we all prepared for the imminent dress rehearsal. After arriving there Friday night, we proceeded to go through our warm-ups and reviewed half the show along with choreography before the lovely Sam walked us through our makeup look for the season and then it was lights out. The morning was very eventful from defrosting a mass of frozen biscuits in the microwave to resetting breakers that had flipped in the middle of the night, but biscuits and gravy and endless amounts of coffee had everyone rearing to go when Leah got there for dance class! She choreographed some beautiful dance choreography and by the time lunch rolled around we all had it under our belts. After lunch we proceeded to go through and review the rest of the show. It was crunch time and a little stressful, but we did it! Makeup and hair went by in a blur and by then it was time for our performance. All the kids marched out in their gorgeous uniforms with their equipment, blocked up, stretched out and warmed up. Both run throughs went by smoothly and we couldn’t be more proud of them! It was stressful, but very rewarding because each of them know how far they have come and how much further we still need to go!

We have two weekends before our first competition and I know we are going to improve so much in the meantime! I know we are going to do wonderful things this season!

- Rebekah

Travel Safety with your Team: Hotel Tips

As many teams are getting ready to hit the road with their first overnight trips of the season, here are some great tips on staying in a hotel with your team!

Choose your rooms wisely
Of course you are going to want all of your rooms to be non-smoking and on the same floor. Especially if you are traveling with high school students, most schools will recommend that you also choose rooms that cannot open to the outside. This includes motels that have rooms that open into the parking lot and rooms that are on the ground floor with windows.

Keep room numbers private
When you receive your room keys, the number will be written on the envelope. Do not write the number on the keys and be sure to keep an accurate roster of which students are in which room in your own room.

Hotel address and phone number
Make sure all of your students and parents have the address and phone number of the hotel that you are staying in for possible emergency situations.

Book a meeting room
A lot of hotels have meeting rooms or ballrooms that are free to use for guests staying in the hotel. They can be a great place to have meetings before lights out without waking other hotel guests. They are also often large spaces in which you can stretch and warm-up as a team.

Trust your intuition
If something seems wrong, be suspicious. Keep an eye out for your students and any other people they might encounter during the trip. Always have everyone's cell phone numbers and make sure they have yours, and also make sure you know where they are at all times.

Taking care of these sort of precautions might seem daunting at first, but it will lead to a much more incredible experience for your students in the long run!

<3 Jackie

When Projects Become Projectiles - Reprinted with Permission

I've been playing with the idea of getting my PhD. Since I have a full-time job and have been putting the dough away as savings for a little while now, I could possibly afford it with some financial aid. The only problem right now is that time doesn't seem to be on my side. See, I have a lot of projects that I am involved in at the moment and all of them are contingent upon me having time to do the things that I need to do to get them done. Not the least of these is my book series, which you see how far I've gotten on book 3 lately *crickets.* It doesn't help that I've been picking up extra little side jobs here and there to keep myself from getting bored.

 

Speaking of those extra little side jobs, I recently wrote up a history for my friend's color guard. She drew out a timeline for me and I put it into words that have been reviewed as "eloquent and thorough." You can read it here:http://www.spintronixguard.org/ then in the navigation bar click "About" and in the drop-down menu click "History."

 

Anyhow, I think it would be so cool to have that Dr. in front of my name. Dr. Hope! How cool is that? And, well, it's sort of something I have wanted my whole life. From when I was a young girl and dreamed of being a veterinarian, all through school and college where I had to call my professors "Doctor so-and-so." It's not really a matter to be taken lightly, though. Having a PhD is something that takes a lot of focus, time, and of course money! So maybe it won't happen right now, but at least its something that I've put some research into.

J.M. Hope

5 ways to incorporate technology and color guard

Cell phones, tablets, YouTube, and everything else! Technology can be a serious distraction for color guard students and a serious hindrance to their improvement as performers.
However, it could be exactly the opposite of that.

We have a Facebook group for our winter guard. Being an independent winter guard, I started this several years ago in order to keep up with students from various schools. It was a great way to communicate and make sure that everyone was doing their part outside of practice to get better FOR practice. Throughout the last several years, I have incorporated a lot of things into this Facebook group using the kids' own technology that I hope you can find useful for your own groups!

1. Posting practice videos. This goes both ways! I make assignments each week in rehearsal and then I make a short post about them in the group to remind everyone. The assignments consist of the students filming themselves practicing at home and posting them to the page. The page is private so the students are only sharing their practice videos with everyone else in the group. I also film the students during practice, especially doing run-throughs of the show, and post those to the page so that students can see themselves performing and know exactly what needs to be better/look better every week.

2. Scheduling. It's fantastic to be able to post events with rehearsal schedules on the Facebook group! Students will receive a reminder on their account when the event is upcoming, plus I can add things like a list of what to bring to rehearsal.

3. Blogging. This might seem like it will take a lot of time and effort for a small thing, but having students write blogs about rehearsal - even if it's just once a week - can be a helpful recruitment and educational tool for the future.

4. Keeping in touch/answering questions. I absolutely love when students post questions on the Facebook group! This lets me know they are thinking ahead, practicing at home, and staying generally organized. Keeping your group relevant in their day-to-day lives can be difficult if you have a weekends-only team like we do.

5. Inspiration. From time to time, I like to post videos of other incredible groups for my students to watch. I also post related articles, videos, and other things that will keep everyone inspired and excited about performing - especially when we have a lot of rehearsal weekends in a row at the start of the season!

Now, of course this will only work if you have a crew of Facebook addicts like I generally have at Spintronix. But it's just one example of taking something that could be a huge problematic distraction and turning it into something useful that will help you improve your program!

<3 Jackie

Productive Weekend - Reprinted with Permission

Yep, it sure has been. Unfortunately, that hasn't applied to getting anything further done on writing my next book. I guess I am going to have to accept that this just has to be my side hobby for now and move on with life.

 

I'm taking an accounting class and honestly, I have shied away from any class that has to do with numbers throughout college because I dislike math. However, I was watching an educational YouTube video the other day and the narrator was explaining this concept that wound up having to do with math. If I had known the video was going to be about math, I would've clicked away and watched a cat video or something I could LOL at, or maybe ROFL, or if I'm really lucky ROFLMAO! But no, I was already hooked into the video and then they started explaining math. Bait and switch, those sneaky YouTube video producers!

 

But I digress! Badly, too!!! The person in the video said something about math that really just sort of clicked for me. He said "Humans created math in order to explain the world around them." and I was like well duh, every math teacher I have ever had has told me this. However, this guy showed an example that made me realize that oh, the entire purpose of numbers really is to explain the world around us. It's just not taught that way to us in school so then we don't really understand, know, or care as to why we have to do these algebraic functions or trigonometry or, heaven forbid, geometry! (I had a special place deep in my bowels for what I thought of geometry in high school...)

 

So anyway, back to my accounting class. I have been at this class for several weeks now. It is an online, independent study course so I can take it at whatever pace I need to take, which is perfect for me because with my life I don't really have time for anything outside of my job, my guard, and occasionally my books (well, you see how that is going anyway). I'm working at the accounting class and I realized something: accounting is really incredibly simple, it just has a lot of fancy language and numbers to learn. But once you boil that fancy language down to what the words really mean and realize that numbers are just our way of explaining the world around us, you realize how incredibly simple it is. I am suspicious that the only reason accountants came up with all those words and surrounded them with math is to scare people away. I bet most people who have passed their high school math classes could easily do their own accounting, but heaven forbid Americans ever gain a semblance of independence from our government.

 

That's a whole other topic for a whole other day. Good night.

J.M. Hope