Overview
When designing an exhibition routine, the question of difficulty is always one to consider. But how do we balance executing cleanly in competition with pushing the skill level of our team? In this article, we’ll explore one way to determine how hard your exhibition routine should be!
What IS Difficulty Anyway?
In our view, there are two basic categories of “difficulty.” Sometimes, they overlap. Many times, they do not. Any discussion of how hard a routine should be should start with a discussion of what’s difficult to begin with! The two categories are:
- Perceived Difficulty – The degree to which an untrained judge or onlooker would assume a movement, sequence, etc. to be.
- Actual Difficulty – The degree to which a performer might struggle to complete the movement, sequence, etc.
Furthermore, when looking at difficulty, there are a few different ways to quantify it. This isn’t an exhaustive list but hopefully you can see that “difficulty” manifests itself in a variety of ways.
- Physical Difficulty – The movement, sequence, etc. requires a high level of physical conditioning to attain due to the strength, stamina, etc. required.
- Timing Difficulty – The movement, sequence, etc. requires a high level of timing awareness for the performer to complete successfully due to the complexity, intricacy, etc. required.
- Interpretation Difficulty – The movement, sequence, etc. requires a high level of training to execution in a similar fashion from performer-to-performer.
Designing Perceived Difficulty
If you are competing, ultimately, you’ll likely want your potential judges to reward the fruits of your labor with points, especially if your scoresheets contain references to how hard a routine is. However, it’s also highly unlikely that your judges will know precisely how difficult anything is if it isn’t truly obvious. Depending on your team’s skill level, you can use this to your advantage. For example, if you have an inexperienced team, perhaps not everyone can throw aerials. However, if you have a few highly-skilled cadets, placing them in a key area to draw attention to them and using the other team members to set them up as a featured moment could have the impression of difficulty on an untrained judge. Think through your routine simply and identify ways to make an untrained onlooker believe something is hard whether it really is…or not!
Growing vs. Cleaning
Your exhibition routine will always sit somewhere on a spectrum from easy to clean to hard to clean. The more difficult your routine, the harder it will likely be to get everyone executing with the same timing, interpretation, etc. With that in mind, we recommend looking at your drill season and basing the inclusion of difficult movements and sequences on your team’s ultimate goal for the year. In a perfect world, we’d say a routine has the “right” amount of difficulty when it will challenge the performers and their abilities through about the month before the final competition. Design a routine too easy and even if you are able to clean it for the early-season, you may lose engagement as it becomes boring for the performers themselves. Design one too hard and you may never quite get the results you want, even after months and months of practice. Ideally, your team will spend the majority of the season chasing down the most difficult portions of their routine. Doing so will allow them to grow, improve, and most importantly, FEEL that growth and improvement throughout the season. It will also set the grounds for the seasons to come. After all, what was “hard” one year starts the next as “normal.”
Don’t Be Afraid to Adjust
Sometimes, your team learns and cleans faster than you’d expect. Something you thought would take them months to get down only takes weeks. On the flip side, sometimes you can spend weeks and weeks on something only to see little to no improvement in the execution. In either case, don’t be afraid to adjust fire and change your sequence or movements to better fit your team. If something once thought challenging has become easy, step it up a notch in some way! If something just isn’t quite coming together the way you hoped, perhaps it’s time to get out the garden hose and water it down. Don’t be afraid to adjust!
Conclusion
Designing an exhibition routine is daunting work that requires careful consideration, a wide array of skillsets, and a solid creative process. There are many resources here on this website to help you take your designing abilities to the next level but we’re also here to help in a more active capacity. CLICK HERE to learn more about bringing our team in to help get your exhibition program going, especially if you’re just getting started!