At 17, Part 1: The Winter Guard

Things to do on my birthday: WGI Semi-finals in Dayton!

Ezra turned 17 this week.

Start with the name. That's the first thing.
Ezra.
But that'll be for Part 2. (If there is a Part 2)

First, I have Winter Guard on my mind.

What is Winter Guard, anyway? Fortunately, there's a web page that succinctly answers that question: "Winter guard is the sport of indoor color guard. Modern color guard is a combination of the use of flags, sabers, mock rifles, and other equipment, as well as dance and other interpretive movement."

Winter Guard lineage ultimately goes back to military color guards, which helps explain the use of flags, rifles and sabres. I could do without that portion of the symbolism, even while admiring the mastery with which high school kids -- mostly girls -- can spin, toss and throw them.

Ezra first joined Winter Guard as an 8th Grader. Aaron convinced them to go to a "try it out" night.
The coach at the time had just created a Junior Varsity team. They did flags, easy tosses, and a cute show about a balloon. They had fun. They won 3rd place medals in their division at the state championships, and 3rd place is a bronze medal!

Cut forward to 11th grade. After skipping 10th grade, Ezra went all in. That meant getting a rifle for home practice, ordering a sabre (there's only one place to get them, really; it's not cheap, and they really do look cool), and practicing and practicing and practicing.

The coach selected 17 kids for this year's varsity team. Rehearsals started Thanksgiving week. Rehearsals took priority. When the band followed the football team to the State Championship game at Ford Field, the Winter Guard had an all-day practice.

They practiced 11 hours every week. They had consecutive days of 7 hour practices during winter break. By the time parents were first allowed a "sneak peak" of the show in early February, the guard had already put in 125 hours of practice. That would be doubled by the time the season ended.

Our show was about the number Pi. It was called "An Infinite Calculation." We reused two years worth of marching band props for the show, and used the Kate Bush song "Pi," as performed by Anne Sofie van Otter. There were some symbolic pi items, the uniform had a stylized pi, and at points in the show the performer would write various math items on a framed plexiglass -- backwards, so the audience could see it correctly. This was about as far from military symbolism as we could go, while retaining the rifles and sabres -- not that we were any kind of exceptions; other shows were set to everything from Mozart to Elton John.

Competition season started the first week of February. Our team competed in two circuits: The Michigan Color Guard Circuit (MCGC) and Winter Guard International (WGI). Scores from competitions in one circuit don't carry over to the other, and there are variances in how each circuit "seeds" teams for its championship competitions. By the end of the season, I had learned the gory details of each system, to the extent that I could explain the difference between a "ranking" and a "rating," and talk about "subcaptions" with a straight face, while other people's eyes rolled back in their heads.

The broken nose.

Our first MCGC competition was at our own high school. With only half of the show ready for performance, and without the costumes, the group did well enough, finishing 4th out of the 8 teams that competed in the "Scholastic A" division, which is the largest grouping of schools.

A couple weeks later, I picked up Ezra after another 5-hour Saturday practice. "We have to go to the emergency room!" Oh? "I broke my nose!" Is it bleeding? "It was, but it stopped." Can you breathe through your nose? "I can't do that anyway." It's Saturday, there's nothing they can really do anyway. So we went home. What happened? "I missed a flag toss. I need new glasses!"

The nose is broken.
I learned how to read an x-ray.
There'll be a surgery. In a few months.
Guard season continued, broken bone and all (nose slightly off to the side).

In March, we had our first WGI competition, in Flint. Unlike the MCGC competitions that include a single performance, the WGI competitions are multiple rounds and essentially last the entire day. Flint had two rounds: two preliminary rounds of 9 teams each, leading to a final round of the teams with the 9 highest ratings across the prelims. We expected to make it to finals, but we couldn't assess how we'd fare against the schools from Indiana, Ohio and Illinois. We cam in 10th. The last spot went to an Ohio school that finished 0.15 points (out of 100) ahead of us. The show was good, but still needed time to "marinate," the coaches said.

The team was told after completing a practice session for the finals, that they hadn't made it. They were given the option of going home. Most stayed. They stayed, they cheered for the other teams, while at nearly the same time often saying, "we're going to beat them." They stayed for the higher level groups, they stayed for the all-male all-black South Shore Junior Cadets from Chicago, they stayed for the very last group, one of the best in the world, called Onyx. It's not really the same sport at that level, but they have the same issues: Onyx's music didn't start correctly, and they had to hold a silent pose for several moments.

South Shore Junior Cadets

Onyx

From that point onward, it was a competition every week, except for Passover/Easter weekend. After a nice showing at a relatively small MCGC event, we had our first travel weekend, to Cincinnati for the WGI Mid-East Power Regional. This competition brought in teams from all across the Eastern portion of the United States. I was all in, Lori was all in. When we arrived at the hotel in Blue Ash, Ohio, the first thing I saw was the prop trailer for the Ohio school that had beaten us by 0.15 points two weeks earlier. We were at the same hotel. And, truth be told, they were really just kids and parents like us, putting in way too many hours and pushing props and living this bit of a weird dream. We overlapped in the hotel waffle room in the morning, and wished each other luck.

38 teams were scheduled in 3 rounds for Scholastic A in the Cincinnati regional; the competition was so large that our preliminaries were held in Campbell County, Kentucky. Lori and I drove through roads that seemed to be winding mountain passes to get there. It was almost as surreal as our drive through Kentucky coming back from the eclipse last year. The weather report had called for heavy snow, and the entire event was nearly canceled. Seven teams elected not to make the trip.

Rehearsing for the Mid-East Power Regional, at a gym in Kenwood, Ohio. March 24, 2018.

It seemed that no announcer could get the name of our show right. It was called "An Inevitable Calculation," "An Exquisite Calculation," and a few other things that I can't even remember. The best name, though, came from the volunteers at Campbell County High: They called it the Ira Joe Fisher show, in honor of the long-time TV Weatherman who had worked several years at WKRC in Cincinnati, and who was famous for writing the temperatures backwards on plexiglass during his reports. By the end of the season, we just called it, "Pi."

We didn't know if the team would make it to semi-finals, but by now the show had marinated. They made it, easily. Not just that, they finished the preliminary round in 11th, far better than the 20th place needed to advance. Semi-finals were at Xavier's Cintas Center. We waited to perform in the wings with the group just in front of us, that had traveled from Georgia to compete. The top 10 would make finals. On the walls, helpful messages such as "no kissing  the walls" were posted.

The Georgia group came in 10th. Lori and I were still in the Cintas Center hall when the WGI crew came out and posted the scores. We came in... 11th. The team from Georgia was still in the hall, and as everyone was trying to parse the scores, we heard the same reaction over and over again, even from the Georgia team: "Oh my God I feel bad for West Bloomfield." They had beaten our team by the nearly impossibly narrow margin of .01. That's when I learned about "subcaptions," which are essentially micro-adjustments that judges can make to shift teams up or down just a little. As it turned out, the subcaptions were not the cause of the .01 point difference, not that that mattered: we wuz robbed!

The next morning, we shared pleasantries with parents from the Ohio team. They were thrilled their team had made semi-finals. They, too, had not made it to the finals. Did it really matter that we'd come in ahead of them, twice, the prior day? Yes, it had! But not really very much.

Spring break meant more 7-hour practices, capped with State Finals at Saginaw Valley State College. They had a good practice, a good run, and ended up in 5th place. By the time we were able leave for him, it was 11pm. We broke Passover at a Pizzeria Uno in Saginaw. A family from another Winter Guard, still in make-up, took the next booth.

State championships, at Saginaw Valley State. April 7, 2018.

We had one last trip: WGI World Championships in Dayton. A 3-day tournament with teams from Portland and Parkland. There were 132 teams just in the Scholastic A division. I watched multiple WGI videos that explained various aspects of the competition, including the guidelines for judges. I realized that some of what I "knew" was wrong, and that I had become a parental Winter Guard Nerd.

The WGI World Championships was spread over 4 sites. Our preliminary performance was back at Cintas Center, only this time we knew almost immediately after the performance that we were going to like the results. When the first set of scores was posted, we knew we would have the first team from our school ever to make it to World Semi-finals. Hundreds of hours of practice, and more than a few kids could now recite dozens of digits from Pi from having heard the song so many times. This was the pay-off.

Later in the day, we went up to University of Dayton Arena, where we watched the preliminary performances of the "Independent World" groups, including two that challenged the norms for how the music and visuals fit together: Bluecoats Indoor "Soundcheck" brought the sound from on and around the stage, and UCF Pegasus had no music at all, just a spoke description of "Guernica," with their members re-enacting Picasso's depiction as the voice-over described the scene. Bluecoats put out a clever "prop cam" video that captured the scene of their final performance.

The semi-final Scholastic A round for was held at Wright State's Nutter Center, on Friday the 13th... my birthday. The kids put on their best show yet, and there were no negatives at all. We had beaten the team from Ohio twice more, and also beaten the team from Georgia twice, and came in ahead of most of the Flint finalists. Mostly, though, we had a show that made sense, in which a team had come together to perform flawlessly as a unit. I took it as a beautiful birthday present. We finished in 41st place in the championships.

Lori and I stayed to watch many other schools. Some were thrilling, some not so much. Either way, it was a shared experience. Lori and I were staying at a hotel along with 2 of the teams that we had seen multiple times over the past couple of months. One team, from the Chicago area, was over the moon: they had made finals for the first time. The other, from Western Michigan, had their season end in the semi-final round. There was snow in the forecast for later that day, so they were going to go see finals. Some of the kids from Illinois practiced their spins out on the hotel lawn. As for us, we went to a mall, we bought some shoes. We took our time, and didn't worry about the next practice. That evening, back in Michigan, the kids gathered to watch the Independent World finals, and a replay of our final show. It wasn't mandatory anymore, but nearly everyone showed.

WGI Semi-Finals, in Dayton. April 13, 2018.

My perspective, of course, is of a parent. I'm happy enough not to be hauling a piece of a stage for a while, or the tarp, or making another 250-mile trip. I think back to high school, the things that were special, the things that required work upon work upon work, and every so often brought some kind of reward. A shared moment, and then it's gone.

Color Guard practice for the 2018 Marching Band season starts next month.