This annual competition is one that winter guard trains very hard for and anticipates all year. It stumps other competitions because it’s a WGI regional and helps them see what place they sit in before they go to WGI finals in April. They have been preparing all year for this competition and have put in countless hours after school and early mornings on the weekends to perfect their performance.

“We started learning our show in November and have been working very hard since then,” senior Lauren Arata said. “We worked very hard especially this week to improve our scores from past competitions.”

They all had different emotions running through them on how they thought this performance was going to go. It’s a big performance to showcase their talent as a team and the emotions of team members were definitely on edge.

“I was incredibly nervous for this performance, but we were all super excited, too,” senior Elizabeth Jansen said. “We’ve had good shows at this contest in past years and we had been working really all week so we felt prepared too.”

Sophomore Leah Chaney, a member of the team, wasn’t able to practice or perform in this competition although she went and cheered them all on as if she was right beside them competing. She sat at all the practices seeing all the time they were putting in to perfect their performance and couldn’t wait to see what they brought to the competition to impress the judges with.

“I thought they would compete really well,” Chaney said. “I knew they had been putting in lots of work to revise the show and bring it up to it’s highest potential.”

They placed first in the competition which means they will be moving on to WGI finals in April. They all had a lot of feelings about their performance and their score after they competed.

“We were very happy after both our prelims and finals performance,” said Arata. “We had two great runs.”