Overview
Teams that want to excel at the highest level know that the end of school year doesn’t meant the end of the drill team! The months you have without academic responsibilities are a prime time for making improvements to your drill team whether large or small!
Some teams will continue to practice regularly and if that describes your group, that’s awesome! But even if you don’t intend to hold regular weekly practices, there are a few key things you CAN accomplish with just a limited amount of time together!
Revamp the Exhibition Routine(s)!
The summer is the perfect time for creating new sequences, learning new skills, and exploring ideas that could become part of your routines for the coming school year.
As a general rule of thumb, we recommend only modifying 15-20% of your existing routine at most to allow for consistent improvement year-over-year. HOWEVER, if you wait to make those modifications (let alone teach them) until the start of the new year, you may find yourself woefully behind the power curve.
With just a few formal (or informal) practices, you can share ideas, explore concepts, and most importantly, take your time to enjoy the process without the imminent pressure of the next drill competition weighing on the team!
Clean Up the Supply & Armory Areas!
Drill team takes a toll on ANY facility no matter how organized, efficient, and neat. The summer is a great time to bring cadets in to field day any areas that really need to be cleaned out, overhauled, or just plain organized.
This is also a perfect time to take stock of the existing inventory of uniform items specific to drill team, make sure there are enough extra rifle screws for the start of the new year when your new members inevitably start breaking practice rifles, and just taking the time to ensure that the areas most utilized by team members are as clean as possible for the start of the new year.
This doesn’t take the whole team, either. It’s easy to bring in a team of cadets to work on this kind of project in whatever spare time they might have available. Most drill team cadets spend a portion of the summer hoping to get a call to do something relating to drill so it may be a valuable opportunity to keep people interested AND get work done at the same time!
Have FUN!
The drill season is stressful and there is always work to be done! Weekends are filled with competitions, fundraising, corps functions, and the myriad of other activities each cadet might be involved with during the normal school year.
The summer represents a perfect time to get everyone together and do some quality team bonding! Whether it’s formal – such as holding a practice followed by a team cook-out – or informal – such as inviting everyone on the team over to someone’s house to swim and watch movies – it’s important for teams to spend time together in a context that isn’t just about working hard.
After all, hard work and no play makes for a really, really dull drill team! It doesn’t have to be often but a fun event even once a month can make all the difference in starting the year with invested, refreshed teammates ready to get down to business!