By promoting a welcoming environment, the indoor color guard team aims to foster long-lasting friendships, improve communication, performance and allow members to find a happy place.
Indoor color guard is a competition group where teams perform dynamic routines. They tell stories through a combination of choreography and flag work to prerecorded music.
This year, the indoor color guard is performing a show called “Seasons of Change.”
According to sophomore Sarah Stratton, the performance “shows how the seasons progress over time.”
As the indoor color guard season begins, they spend time getting to know each other and forming a bond as teammates.
“For the first month, we’ll do little icebreakers,” team captain Sarah Ralston said.
According to Ralston, the team does many team bonding activities throughout the season, such as going out to dinner and having breakfast together before competitions.
“It’s a good way to bring everybody together,” Ralston said.
According to Rhodes, being in color guard helped ease her transition into high school and helped her make new friends.
“I didn’t have a lot of friends at the beginning of the school year [and] I’ve never been someone who has a big group of friends,” Rhodes said, “but now I have a bunch of people that I talk to daily.”
Many color guard members feel that they made their best friends through the group.
“A lot of my greatest friends are from color guard,” Stratton said.
Rhodes feels the same way and said the color guard members are “some of my favorite people.”
Sophomore Paula Reyes’s favorite part of being in the indoor color guard is “the friends I’ve made.”
Indoor color guard director Heather Fisher takes great pride in the bonds the teammates form.
“[Members gain] a great friendship and a great friend group,” Fisher said. “I take great pride in that. They all get along, and they’re all kind to each other.”
Reyes said the teammates’ bond has been portrayed in their performance.
They can feel more comfortable messing up and asking questions to improve individually and as a group.
Ralston makes a similar point. She says the team’s strong bond “helps everybody enjoy it more because people want to go to practice.”
“People want to work with each other and encourage each other,” Ralston said. “I think the morale is a lot higher than it would be if no one liked each other.”
According to Fisher, the color guard holds an event where students can try out what being in the color guard is like, and “you can come see if you would like it.”
Stratton said this year’s try-it-out night is May 20 from 6-8 p.m.
Various members of the color guard believe more people should be involved in the activity.