Overview
I’m sure you’ve been there. We all have. You’re marching and things are great. You’re crushing it! Alignment’s to the right and cover’s to the front. There’s 40 inches back-to-chest (or approximately 36 inches for our Army friends).
But then…
“Platoon (or Flight for our Air Force friends), HALT!”
Suddenly, everything is…dare we say…absolutely hosed up?
What about this one?
You’re marching the flight (or platoon for our Marine Corps & Navy friends) and no matter how many times you scream to “Dress right! Dress. RIGHT! DRESS RIGHT!” your team just won’t, you know, dress to the right?
Ugh.
In all these situations, there is one common denominator: your team can’t align.
Just kidding! Your team absolutely CAN align – there’s just something else obscuring their ability and it’s YOUR job to help them overcome it!
Whether it’s a difference in technique, different interpretations of what to do when halting, or just plain ol’ differences in understanding what alignment actually means, there’s always something ELSE to blame.
What Is Poor Alignment
It’s standing next to someone, perfectly in line, side-to-side, as judged by the heels of each cadet (and therefore the hips, shoulders, and heads because, of course, we have proper posture!)
There we go. Now that we know what alignment is, we’ve got this. All we have to do is stand next to someone!
But wait…that’s so easy anyone could do it…and my team…um…can’t?
You see, bad alignment is a symptom, not a cause. If you’re feeling rather itchy, it would not be useful for the doctor to diagnose you with itchiness. You’d want to run some tests for allergies and then find out specifically what you’re allergic to. Without that key information, you might end up trying to remedy your scratching problem with something completely and woefully ineffective. After all, being itchy because you brushed some poison ivy is one thing but no amount of lotion is going to help when the actual cause is a high pollen count.
Ok, we’re getting kind of out there. But you get the idea. You can’t fix alignment by telling people about the alignment. In the minuscule amount of cases where this actually works, it’s probably more like your reminder got that cadet to check back in and a lack of engagement or focus was ACTUALLY to blame.
Drillers who understand alignment rarely miss when it comes to having great alignment. And drillers who don’t may spend months spinning their wheels until they guesstimate their way into something resembling success.
So if the problem isn’t alignment itself, what is it?
Problem: My cadets aren’t aligned when standing in line or column formation BEFORE any marching has occurred. I tell them to fall in, command them to Dress Right, and even after they’ve adjusted, they just aren’t aligned.
This one is great because it has literally nothing to do with anything that the cadets are DOING. It has far more to do with what they SEE and how they are mentally INTERPRETING the data provided by their eyes.
Best case scenario, they’re fundamentally misunderstanding what they’re seeing. But worst case scenario, they aren’t thinking about it or don’t know what to think about at all and are just doing their best to guess until they stop getting criticized.
The best thing we can do in this scenario is very simple:
Firstly, we need to understand great posture. Great posture leads to sending great signals. If our ears aren’t aligned with our shoulders and our shoulders to our hips and our hips to our heels, we aren’t going to be able to accurately interpret the signals our eyes are sending us no matter how much we use our peripheral vision.
THIS VIDEO has a full breakdown of how to establish great posture that will contribute to great alignment. Start there and make sure each key point is covered with your team!
Next, we need to establish what great alignment LOOKS like when standing with great posture and eyes straight forward.
The coach, commander, or key leader of the team should place each individual cadet into their formation in line formation. It helps to utilize a drill area with lines on the ground which can provide outstanding references for alignment of the heels. Painstakingly position each cadet so that the entire formation is mathematically perfect. Then, place the team at attention.
Instruct the team to intentionally look forward and observe what they can see. Have their scan with their peripheral vision from left to right and observe intentionally what it looks like to stand in a formation with perfect alignment.
Then, have them intentionally break their alignment slightly. Have everyone move in a direction by several inches. Place them at attention. Have the the team intentionally observe what this looks like both while looking straight ahead and while scanning left to right. From here, without breaking bearing, direct the cadets to regain their alignment WITHOUT looking with anything but their eyes! Then allow the cadets to check their work. See how close they got. Give and receive feedback. Repeat until the differences are minuscule.
Repeat this process with the formation in COLUMN formation! You’ll have to change the distances and intervals so take your time setting a “perfect” formation so be meticulous.
Learning to SEE properly and interpret those visual signals with intentionality is the first step to fixing poor alignment while standing WITHOUT having marched beforehand!
Problem: When marching in column formation, my cadets just aren’t aligned.
The solution here is covered in THIS VIDEO on marching.
To make a long story short, the answer is likely a difference in stride which is CAUSED by a difference in marching technique. Some cadets may be extending their leg fully, some may not be shifting their weight forward throughout the duration of the step, some might be using more or less bend in their knees.
In any case, if you’ve gone through the FIRST exercise and are confident the cadets do understand good alignment, it’s time to revisit marching technique to ensure absolute uniformity.
In our 10+ years of experience, poor alignment on the march is highly likely the result of a non-uniform marching technique.
Problem: After calling a Left or Right Flank, our alignment absolutely falls apart.
The solution here is covered in THIS VIDEO on pivoting.
The answer is likely that each cadet is interpreting the final step before the actual pivot differently and, therefore, everyone is establishing a base of alignment that is SLIGHTLY different than those around them.
Once you’ve solved this, if you still have an alignment issue, the issue is likely an understanding of WHERE to dress.
It’s logical to dress all the way to the right but if we are four cadets across (as in a 12-cadet formation), it’s probably more effective to dress to the CENTER. In this scenario, the center pair of cadets are able to work together to unify their step technique, approach, etc. while the outer cadets only need to dress to ONE singular individual!
Problem: We’re marching pretty well. Everything is going great. But every halt command absolutely rips our formation apart.
The video on marching above will assist in this but the answer is REALLY simple:
It’s highly likely your cadets are engaged in the world’s most impossible guessing game wherein each cadet attempts to reach each other cadet’s mind about what they believe everyone else might be thinking.
If your head hurts reading that, imagine the mental gymnastics required to make it make sense. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t.
Instead of trying to GAIN alignment when halting, focus on TAKING THE EXACT SAME SIZED STEP ON THE FINAL STEP EVERYONE HAS BEEN TAKING PREVIOUSLY!
This is super logical – if your marching alignment is awesome but your HALTING alignment is not, it makes sense that the simplest solution is to practice intentionally taking the same sized step on the final halt as you were on the march.
Though this is a deceptively simple solution, without intentionally defining this technique and practicing it repeatedly, it’s very difficult to establish consistency in alignment when coming to a halt.
But that’s not all…Here comes some more eye-brain connection stuff…
Another reason the alignment rips on the halt may be due to an unconscious – or totally conscious – desire to maintain interval FRONT TO BACK. In other words, cadets may be shortening or lengthening their final steps as they see others getting closer to or pulling away from them.
If cadets can identify this being a factor in their on-the-pad decision making, the solution is to ensure that each cadet understands their individual responsibility.
Cadets in the BASE squad (could be right or left depending on the requirements of the segment) are the only ones who should be concerned with maintaining distance back-to-chest. Every other cadet in the formation should primarily concern themselves with alignment to that base squad and completely ignore their spacing front-to-rear.
The reason is simple: judges are primarily concerned with alignment. We can express this mathematically (kind of…):
(Poor distance AND poor alignment = 2 bad things) < (Poor distance AND proper alignment = 1 bad thing)
Correct distance < Correct alignment
In short, judges will always reward proper alignment and are far more likely to overlook poor distance in alignment is great. On the flip side, judges will RARELY reward proper distance without proper alignment also present.
In summary, you’ll never get any credit for proper distance at the expense of alignment and, therefore, we reduce the burden of distance front-to-rear to ONLY the base squad.
This lengthy explanation is needed in almost 100% of on-site trainings we’ve conducted.
And the crazy thing?
That’s a long explanation for exactly what’s written in each drill manual.
Conclusion
These are just SOME of the scenarios that you might encounter but these are the solutions we’ve implemented in the past to great success!