Color Guard Tosses Their Flags to New Heights

Wave your white flags and surrender because the Tiger Color Guard is marching through!

Hastings Senior High School’s Tiger Color Guard won the Best Overall Color Guard Award at the UNK Band Day Parade on September 20 and tied for second at the Columbus Marching Festival on September 27.

The Tiger Color Guard was announced as the Best Overall Color Guard out of 36 other competing schools.

“It was very surreal,” Color Guard Captain McKenna Buresh said. “I was trying to hold in my excitement down on the field with all the other bands.”

Some of the schools competing were Kearney High School and Grand Island Senior High School. Oftentimes, these schools would win the individualized color guard awards.

“Honestly, I didn’t expect us to do that well just because Kearney is so incredibly good,” Buresh said. “To see that we got [an award], in a parade especially, is just like… wow.”

When the color guard performed their choreography, judges walked among them and reported their evaluations live using headsets.

“It does intimidate you a lot because you can kind of hear them speaking into their mics, and you’ll hear them saying simple comments as they’re judging,” Buresh said. “Although, I only heard good ones, which was kind of a confidence booster.”

Before the award was announced, the color guard waited for the results while resting in their bus.

“‘Are we going to get it? Are we not going to get it?’ A lot of us were kind of just really out of it,” senior Finn Groves said.

As captain, Buresh was one of the first people to know about the results, alongside Band Director Troy Ehmke. She got to watch the rest of the color guard’s reactions when they heard the news.

“[The color guard] was so excited, and you could tell they were proud of themselves… it was just something you’ll never forget,” Buresh said. “It kind of made me proud of myself and my ability to teach my guard well.”

At the Columbus Marching Festival on the following Saturday, the Tiger Color Guard tied with Grand Island Northwest for the excellent rating, and Kearney took the superior rating.

“When we go up against Kearney and Grand Island, they have such amazing color guards,” Buresh said. “I am so happy when they get all their awards because they put in so much work for it.”

The color guard believes not placing superior at Columbus after winning the Best Overall Color Guard award a week earlier is no reason to be disappointed.

“I do believe that for the work we’ve put in and how much time we’ve put into it, we deserved the excellent,” Buresh said. “But, there’s always room to build off of in these upcoming competitions.”

The team holds practices (called sectionals) for about two hours each week, running through their choreography and cleaning up their counts. They also attend band camp in the summer for guided practice and community bonding.

“[Practice is] absolutely worth it. If we don’t have sectionals to fine tune and learn our choreography as a group, it really affects us,” Buresh said. “It just brings us down if we’re not all together… and we’re not all improved together.”

New freshmen joined the color guard, so more practices have been spent teaching them the basics.

“It gets very stressful trying to teach them all the brand new concepts,” Buresh said. “But, I try to keep a positive attitude. They’re very outgoing, loud, and definitely extravagant, but they listen very well and have caught on quickly.”

With the addition of new freshmen to the color guard, more mistakes were made. The third movement of the color guard’s choreography was added a few days prior to the competition, so the freshmen had to learn it while practicing basic concepts at the same time.

“I saw mistakes, but they got back on really quickly, and I’m really proud of them for that,” Groves said.

Buresh likes to mention her sophomore year when talking to the freshmen, citing how she was not musically inclined and color guard was a brand new experience for her.

“They’ve got three years ahead of them,” Buresh said. “You just have to be patient with yourself and understand you will make mistakes, but it is not the end of the world… Think about it, and talk about it. Then, move on and learn from it.”

The senior members advise the freshmen to keep pushing despite the hardships they face.

“It is definitely very difficult, but getting those rewards and just putting on a good show… that’s what we worked for at the end of the day,” Groves said.

Though joining the color guard lets members win awards, Buresh thinks the sport is rewarding in more than one way.

“I don’t think of it as a hobby. It’s taught me a lot of life lessons… things you wouldn’t expect out of a band program,” Buresh said. “It’s a beautiful art.”

Others, like Groves, view the color guard as family.

“I’m with them all the time, and some of them I treat literally as my siblings,” Groves said.

The color guard appreciates the support they receive from family, friends, coaches, band directors, and former color guard alumni.

“Thank you for all the support you have given us, and thanks for not giving up on us when things got hard,” Groves said.

Although the Tiger Color Guard has already won the Best Overall Color Guard award, they are not stopping just yet.

“It is going really well, and we are going to go to a lot of places in the future,” Buresh said.