I just don’t understand. We’ve been doing this for two years, and still no one gets it. What do we do? What are we doing wrong? For starters, coordination and choreography aren’t something one can learn overnight, not in a week, not in a few months, maybe not even in a year or two. It takes time. Many people join expecting immediate results, not realizing the discipline and repetition required to perform as one unit. When progress feels slow, motivation drops, and commitment begins to fade. This gap between expectations and reality has been one of the biggest challenges our team has faced so far.

Our drill team has been around for about two, nearly three, years now. The team is primarily composed of whoever shows up; we were really desperate for members at the beginning. Taking a look at other schools, some of them have tryouts for their drill team, whereas we just get who we get. Oh well, we'll work with what we have. One of our main problems is that we have had people come and go on our team throughout its existence, which has led to some commitment issues.

In the first year of our team's establishment, I wasn’t on it. Even from the outside, I could see that the main issue with the team was showing up. People that year absolutely drove our instructor insane with actions versus words. “Yes, CMC, I’ll be at the comp,” and then they'd back out at the last minute. It happened a lot more often than it should have. This year, it happened a lot less. We have a decently dedicated team, where the main problem now is a lack of practice.

At our practices, there is too much fooling around. It’s the same person every time, making people laugh while we’re trying to focus on our techniques and form. It’s distracting our newer members, and they’re not learning properly because of it. I am second in charge of the team; I was recently given a very helpful tip from one of my instructors to help deal with the people slacking off. Since one of the guys fooling around is a senior member, I’d have him teach specific moves and tricks to the newer members, so he is more focused on teaching and less focused on messing around.

The month before school started, we brought in a team of 3 world-class drillers to help train us and give our team tactics over the course of about a week. They’re called Drill Team Dynamics. In 5 days, they had officially changed the way we think about everything as a drill team. We started adding words to our movements to sync up better; we started doing regular things the same way as each other to build our synchronization.

So far, it’s working. Our drill team is doing significantly better in communicating and movement coordination. We just had our first competition on the 15th of November. We absolutely dominated.

There are a lot of things that could definitely use work, but for our first competition, we did exceptionally well. As we progress into the year, we will keep growing as a team and continue to learn new sequences together. It can only go up from here.

In America, everyone has equal opportunity. Anyone can be on our drill team; they just need to be willing to show up and put in the work. We have the resources, and the individuals have the discipline. Each must make the decision whether to show up or not. That’s the beauty of the team. That’s the beauty of America.

© Justin. All rights reserved. If you are interested in quoting this story, contact the national team and we can put you in touch with the author’s teacher.