Winter Guard!

Is it a sport?

…..kinda?

A sport is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as “an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which a team or individual competes against each other or others for entertainment.”

All of which happens during a winterguard season and each performance.

In competition, there are three components. Every guard must have dance, weapon, and flag work. Usually, less experienced guards will be stationary while doing most of their flag and weapon work, and the more advanced groups will be doing the “drill” while simultaneously performing their work.

“Drill” is the movement in the program. In winter guard performances, the viewer will see individuals doing jeté’s and chassé’s across the floor to reach their preselected places/folds on the floor. Often, the flag, rifle, or overall dance choreography will intertwine with the floor movement, and the performers will form shapes and lines in which they execute their work.

 At times, this can be the hardest part of the performance. Usually, members will learn the choreography and counts and stay stationary while doing it, and then incorporate the movement later because of how much harder it is. Imagine tossing a flag over your head, at a perfect 45 degree angle, and also having to move while catching it. This is the same with a double-turn-around, which is exactly how it sounds. You toss a flagpole with enough height and velocity so that it will do two complete rotations mid-air. The turn-around, is spinning a complete 360 degree rotation. You get four counts, or seconds to do this. A way that most will make this move a little easier is by saying the words, “Toss, turn, look, catch” and doing movement as they say it.

Weapon is a whole different area that winter guard members need to master. Rifle and sabre are both incredibly hard to perform, but saber can tend to be a little harder. Sabre, unlike rifle, depends on skill and lighting. If the lighting during a competition is poor, the sabre is practically invisible to the person tossing it. Which results in a incomplete catch and a loss of points.

In an instance where this happens in competition, the participants have maybe three seconds to figure out where to catch the sabre to prevent it from hitting the floor which would result in point deductions.

So, how is our school’s winter guard?

For our relatively small size, only nine members, our team still manages to place and receive positive scores at competitions. In fact, this 2018 season is the first in ten years that our guard has been good enough to move into a higher competition class, which is a pretty big deal. 

Now, we are placed against schools with much larger numbers of members that are more talented and harder to beat. But everyone on the team will tell you, that they welcome the challenge.

But back to the question, “Is Winter Guard a sport?”

Only the people that fail to understand the complexity of the sport will say otherwise.