Winter Color Guard

By: Danny Olivares | Arts & Entertainment Editor

April 25, 2018

The end of the winter season doesn’t only translate to it being time to put on your flower clowns and hallucinate at music festivals, it also means the bittersweet conclusion of yet another productive Winter Color Guard season. Whats color guard? If you ever attended a football game at our school, they’re the dancers in lavish costumes who perform with the marching band. However, there is more to dancing when it comes to color guard, spinning flags and tossing fake weapons such as rifles and sabers are also involved. Before anyone accuses the team of promoting violence to the younglings with their display of weapons, it’s important to know that this originates from a very old tradition from our U.S military.

 When winter rolls around, the guard recruits new members and begins rehearsing their solo show in order to compete against other guards in Southern California. This year’s theme was titled “I’m a Believer,” and to no surprise, the song choice was Believer by American modern rock band, Imagine Dragons. When asking the guard’s coach Aylana Ryan why this theme, she replied, “Our guard has been ignored by the school and students, we’re the underdogs. We want to show people that we still believe in our worth and who we are.” In a turn of events, the guard managed to bump up to a higher division for competition. Guess they really are believers. When asking senior member, Julissa Mendez, how she felt about this division jump, she incited that “ I was very scared and nervous for our team because we stayed in the same division for two years. However, it was still exciting at the same time because it showed that we had potential. We were better than we were last year.”

Altogether there were eighteen members total, larger than its typically eleven person team. What’s more revolutionary for the guard is perhaps that four out of the eighteen members were boys. With color guard being a female-dominated sport, it’s quite rare to see a team with more than one guy. Ashton Arenas, the longest standing boy of the group and SCHS junior informed me that “It’s pretty exhilarating, especially when I was one of the only boys at one point. You get teased a lot about being ‘too feminine’ but if it’ something that you really like to do, do it. It shouldn’t matter what people think . Guard is a group effort and is a lot of fun.”

The scoring for competitions starts at 50 and ends at 100. Although the guard started the reason with a 62 and ended with a 72, which is a pretty good score, they unfortunately have been placing in last and second-to-last-place every competition. Despite the season being a blunder competition-wise, they still managed to keep up with the more advanced and funded color guards thanks to the members’ excitement, the coach’s dedication, and the help of parent volunteers.