Saturdays are usually reserved for sleeping in, hanging out with friends, and catching up on sleep. This Saturday, however, the marching band earned the Best Auxiliary Award at the Jaguar Pride Marching Invitational, as well as Best Visual and second place in their division.

“When you go to a competition it’s either divided by school size or band size, but we prefer band size like this weekend’s because we have a smaller band size,” junior Deirdre Jost said. “We won the Best Auxiliary Award, which means that out of the five schools in our competition, we had the best color guard.”

It has been so long since the color guard won the Best Auxiliary award that there is no record on file of the last win.

“When we found out we won, we were all sitting together in the stands. Our thing as a group is that when we win, we just stand up and don’t say anything, but it was hard to contain my excitement. I was sitting next to my friend who is also in guard and I kind of shook her a little bit,” Jost said.

In preparation for the competition, the band practiced four days a week, in addition to a two week band camp in the summer.

“Color guard practiced once a week all summer training the freshmen, so by the time band camp finished the marching band had about one-third of the show done. At this point, we’ve probably had over 200 hours of practice,” junior Alison Clay said.

This was the band’s last competition of the season, and some said that that made for more nerves than the other ones.

“I was really excited. I’m always really excited for the last competition, but this one is one that we’ve done before so it helped that it was familiar, even if it was a little windy,” Clay said. “I think I dropped my rifle in the first show because of the wind, but at the end of the day we won Best Auxiliary which hasn’t happened in a really long time. That made it all worth it.”