When you go to a football game, you probably go there to either watch the football game or use the four quarters as a time to catch up with friends and to have fun cheering on your time even if you know they will lose. Very few people go there to watch the marching band at half-time, and the number decreases even more if you count the number of people that go to football games to watch the colorguard. Colorgaurd is known to most people as flag twirling. The people twirling the flags/other equipment are simply the flag-twirlers or flag girls. I believe colorguard is a very misunderstood sport. And yes, I guess it was certified as an actual sport some time last year. People are too quick to judge how easy and make an ignorant decision on how well or badly the colorguard did.
I think the thing that most people don’t realize is that colorguard is actually very difficult. Don’t get me wrong, it does get easier after time, and for some people it comes naturally; but I have never seen someone who has never been in colorguard before pick up a flag, rifle, or even sabre for the first time and throw it perfectly, or do work perfectly, or do anything perfectly for that matter. There are many different tosses that you can do with each of the pieces of equipment. It starts with a single, it spins one time around. Next it goes to a double; two times around. Then it keeps going up, triple (3), quad (4), and so on.
I guess I should start with the basics. Most people know what a flag is; it would be extremely sad if you didn’t, considering every country/state or province has one. The flags we use for colorguard are non-country flags taped onto 5’-6’ metal poles depending on what they are being used for. The poles with the flags can range from 5-15 lbs depending on what weights you put in them or how many pieces are sewed onto the flag. Any of the equipment used in colorguard also feels a lot heavier when you start doing work and tossing them.
A rifle is a piece of wood, shaped like a rifle (as in a gun) with a metal “bolt” on top. A bolt on a gun rifle would probably be the part underneath where the scope would be. A rifle is my favorite type of equipment on guard. Rifle hurts a lot and it very hard to get used to.
The last is sabre. Sabres are shaped like slightly bent swords. They have got plastic handles and a metal blade attached. They resemble more of a samurai sword but differ in handles. If my description was not clear I suggest you Google it. Sabres are by far the lightest in guard equipment but hurt the most when you catch them. You may be wondering how it would hurt to catch them. By catching everything in the right spot, and catching it hard and firm, it kills your hand on impact. If you accidently hit yourself, it almost guarantees you a enormous and gorgeously colored bruise where it hit.
These three things are just the basic equipment that colorguards will use. There are so many factors that go into an overall performance. Each guard has to learn drill, which I will come back to in another post, learn work, try to get everyone together and on the right counts of the work, and try to make uncoordinated people to look graceful when they perform during dance work. So next time you go to a football game and actually watch the colorguard, try to think about how hard it is before you make any snap judgments about if the guard is good.
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