Championship show: Medina hosts annual winterguard event
Girls dressed in brilliant costumes spun flags and rifles, combining acrobatics with music in the Medina High School gym.
Saturday was the Northeast Color Guard Circuit 2022 Champion-ships, conducted this year in Medina. Winterguard is a sport involving dance, gymnastics, athletic maneuvers, and choreography, but combined with the movements of rifles, flags, and sabres. The whole thing is set to music with an artistic story or theme in a 10 to 15 minute show.
Multiple units from school districts throughout the region participated, giving their all in a series of choreographed routines.
Between performances girls stopped at a large table with buttons — the kind you wear if you’re a fan. They represented each of the guards, old performances and pictures of the kids. There were also generic buttons which the members picked through.
Mike Dreyfus was the person creating the buttons, and has been doing it for the past 20 years.
“Like anything it started out real small to help support the band, and then parents wanted buttons,” he said. “The main reason I do it is it’s the memories that gives these kids.”
Dreyfus said kids in the Winter Guard need to be organized and committed, and they’re like family. Working as a probation officer for 40 years and then an alcohol and drug therapist for 15 years, Dreyfus said one of the best prevention programs is the Winterguard.
“It gives them a sense of belonging, purpose, family, achievement,” he said. “And the academics, oh my god.”
Dreyfus said he used to think it was smart kids who joined the band. He found out that students in the Winter Guard began excelling academically because of what’s going on in their brain to excel in the event.
Dreyfus spoke of a girl who joined in the seventh grade who was failing math — the first semester after joining the Winterguard she passed.
The second semester she was getting B’s in math. By the time the girl was a senior she was on the honor roll, and Dreyfus said she was excelling in math and choosing to go to RIT to major in physics.
Dreyfus asked her how she went to failing math to studying physics at RIT, and was told when she started spinning and catching things it was done to beats and rhythms. Then she began to understand how algebra and equations were expressing it linearly.
It’s all just one more positive of the highly-practiced and competitive event.
The winners of the Winter Guard Championship:
■ Novice class — Hinsdale with 64.16
■ Cadet class — Victor in first with 75.06
■ RA class — Greece with 82.18
■ A1 class — Lancaster with 84.77
■ SA class — Victor with 88.73; Medina came in fourth with 83.31
■ IA class — Gates Chili with 88.57; Batavia in second with 88.22
■ Senior class — Luminosa with 86.80c
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