The season is changing: The weather is getting colder, leaves are falling from the trees and the Hayes guard team is transitioning from marching band to winter guard.
While the two have the same premise of creating visuals using flags and dancing, there are some differences. During the marching band/football season, guard has to conform to the theme of the music that the band is playing, along with having to worry about wind and weather, which limits the amount of tricks they can work into choreography.
Meanwhile, winter guard consists of only the guard team and is inside. This allows the team to choose their own music and enables them to do bigger throws without the uncertainty of rogue elements like wind and weather.
“There’s so much more creative freedom,” coach Brittany Green said. “The things that I wanted to do in the fall season, I couldn’t do because it was outside.”
Along with less restrictions, the guard also gets more attention from judges, as they are not overshadowed by the band.
The winter guard competes from January through April around Ohio, receiving both praise and criticism from judges.
“Our show is a lot shorter, but the judges pay closer attention to smaller aspects of it, like the meaning behind the show,” sophomore guard member Alexis Graham said.
Last winter was the winter guard’s first season back from a hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, the team was still able to place in the top five at states and now has a better understanding of what judges are looking for.
“Now [we] know what we’re capable of and [we] know that we can do more than that this year,” junior section leader Avery Takas said. “It makes me feel better that we actually did well last year, so that means we can do better this year.”
Yet this success and motivation has not come without some struggle; the guard team has had five different coaches over the past three years.
Despite this inconsistency, the team has been able to adjust.
“We got to experience different ways of being taught,” Takas said. “That was different every season so we learned a lot more, and I think it made us stronger as a group.”
With the last coach leaving in the middle of last season, the team’s newest coach has been with the guard since band camp in July.
“They welcomed me with open arms,” Green said. “[It] definitely was hard putting a new [coach] in and getting criticized by [the new coach]. [The team] definitely didn’t know how they were going to feel about it, but it went as well as it could have.” For their competition routine, Green said she wants to have a more emotional theme; a dance with a song that gets the audience invested. The team was unable to get the rights to the original song they wanted, but are still hoping to make the theme work.
“This show is a very emotional, like in your feels, you just want to sit there, watch and listen to the lyrics and get all into it,” Green said. “It’s not a set show yet … but that’s the show that I’m foreseeing.”
