Color guard is spending 15 to 20 hours a week marching up and down a football field or on a 50 by 70 foot area spinning a 3 1/2 pound rifle, or manipulating a 6 foot pole with a flag attached, or tossing a 2 pound metal sabre 15 feet into the air. It's spending your free time striving for perfection and hearing: "That's wrong! Pay attention! Try harder! Do it again!" over and over. It’s riding countless hours on cold, bumpy buses and eating in more fast food restaurants than you care to remember. Sometimes you march with blisters on your feet, splints on your fingers, bumps and bruises everywhere, when you're sick, or when every muscle in your body aches. It means being willing to try again even though you have just suffered a defeat, tears are streaming down your face and your heart is breaking.

Then another Saturday night comes! Judges, instructors, other guards, and 500 or 600 spectators are waiting for your performance. For five or six minutes every ounce of your strength and concentration are dedicated to making your family, friends, school, and town proud of your competitive unit. The demanding, endless hours of practice have been a prelude to this moment. There is the hope in your heart, "Please, let this one be ours!"

But color guard is much more than hard work and intense competition. It is closeness between young people that cannot be described. It is doing your best and knowing that you have your very own group of "fans" who you will always encourage and support you, whether you win or lose.

It is exact, specific and it demands precise execution. A designer's drill is a chart; a graph which indicates x and y coordinates for constantly changing geometric shapes and forms in both time and space. Our equipment, body movements and props are always pushing the laws of physics with force and speed, action and reaction, all with incredible control and accuracy.

It is rhythmically and metrically based on the subdivision of time into fragments that must be executed simultaneously. We have angles and degrees, both acute and obtuse, sequences, ranges, and depth of dimension.

It is a visual picture alive with message and meaning. We use interpretive phases, sentences, and words many times with music that creates a most complete and universal language, to be recorded for others to see, feel, and understand. It is a language that is recited and shared many times both near and far.

Colorguard is influenced by the environment and by the time it is created and performed. It can reflect the past as well as the future. It can send us to a far away country or bring us closer to home. We are rich in our heritage and have forefathers as well.

It requires fantastic coordination of fingers, hands, arms, feet, and legs; in addition to extraordinary control of the back, stomach, and torso; all of which are called to respond instantly to the sound the ear hears and the sight of the eyes. Colorguard is endurance, ability, strength, and balance.

A game we play with others in which we share and we shine competing against ourselves and others to perform better each time. It allows us to learn confidence and fear, self-esteem and self-image; as we get better on the outside with performances, people, expressing our feelings, and sharing our dreams. It is a chance to realize our attitude, and nothing else is what makes us or breaks us. It is a kind of mind set with an increased awareness of our own potential to succeed.

It is a show that can be entertaining and enlightening! With action and reaction, dance, motion, emotion, color, drama, suspense, fashion, flair, excitement, pizzazz, sophistication, and subtlety. Always realizing the triad of true performance: audience, performer, designer.