Drum line, Color Guard Dominate
March 25, 2015
The Diamond Bar High School Drumline and Color Guard teams move to their own distinctive beats, between the resonance of drums and the spinning of flags; however, they both zipped through the competition season at an impressive pace.
World Line, the school’s Varsity Drumline, moved into a lofty position after beating Rowland High School in two different competitions. The competitions took place on Feb. 14 at Damien High School and on March 1 at Monrovia High School, with World Line taking first in both.
A Line, the Junior Varsity Line, also competed in both competitions, although it went to Monrovia on Feb. 28. Rather than compete solely against Rowland, the JV line competed against several other JV drumline groups.
“Our A-line, [while] they’re pretty new and still had a successful season, placed eleventh and eighth out of many schools,” junior Nick Santos, a tenor drummer on World Line, said. A-line then improved at a competition on March 8 at Temescal Canyon High School, where it finished in second place.
In each competition, drumline is judged based on how well they play the music, as well as the general effect and the movement of the drummers during the performance.
“The only competition that counts towards our record is finals,” junior Kristie Leung, snare section leader of World Line, said via Facebook. “The competitions before are for critiques and commentary so that we know how to improve.”
World Line will compete in state finals on Apr. 4 at CSU San Bernardino along with other drum lines from California.
Color Guard also had a great start to its competitive season, and the Varsity Color Guard members are continuing to unfold their plans to awe the judges. On Feb. 28, the Varsity, Junior Varsity and freshman Guard teams competed at Arcadia High School, and Varsity Guard came away with first place with a score of 74.82 points.
“[Other teams] all did pretty well also. Second place was Downey High School, and they 70.69 so they were four points below us,” co-captain Hedy Yu said. In the other divisions, JV came in second place and freshmen placed sixth.”
Then, Varsity and JV soared in the desert heat at the WGASC Phoenix Regionals on March 14, where they competed against color guards from Arizona and California. There, both teams were able to achieve first place in both preliminaries and finals. This also marked the first time that JV attended regionals.
The team has been working on choreography since December, to prepare for February and March, the main competition season. The national competitions for Color Guard will take place in April. Yu said that the team has been gradually improving throughout the season, and has performed more consistently than in the past year.
“Last year we definitely started just as strong as we did this year, but somewhere in the middle we got too comfortable being the king of everything so we started to not pay attention to little things,” Yu said.
