I spun sickles last year, and it was a lot of fun. What does everyone else think about them? What do you think about them being an illegal piece of equiptment for winter guard?

You have at least 4 threads out on this board right now!
Im not trying to be mean but you CAN combine questions!

Sorry, I got on a roll, and then I realized that I may make ppl mad...

I'm sorry to ask a stupid question, but what's a sickle? I haven't been doing guard that long and I have no idea what this is.

First of all, no you can't always combine questions because then you can't write an informative subject line. Second, this board is SO dead, I'm just glad to see someone posting for a change. We still have threads from Jan on the front page, so y'all need to get off Munki's back. I looked at all her posts, and they're all good questions.

OK, back to the topic. There is no official definition for sickle as far as color guard goes. It's a curved piece of equipment, but sickles come in many flavors. As far as sickles not counting toward your equipment time... I don't really care. Maybe this is just me being old, but when I marched, in order to get equipment time, EVERY member of the guard had to be holding equipment - even people behind the panels. Now, you just need 4 (it's 4 right? or is it 8?) people on equipment and everyone else can be dancing or spinning sickles or whatever. So having "official" equipment isn't as important as it used to be. One year, I had my kids using bat wings (which were basically 2 connected swing flags) and I didn't make my equipment time because the wings weren't detachable. duh. Do we cut them in half and reattached them with velcro, and somehow that made a difference (even though we didn't change the work, never took them apart during the show, and the audience couldn't tell a difference). So yeah, I don't care if sickles are official or not.

I am not sure about official rules either. I do know that sickles were alright last season almost unofficially, but this season they are not counted. About equiptment time, last year we had our soloist on rifle just do all of the block dance with the rest of the guard while holding her rifle and that seemed to keep our equiptment time just fine.

WGAZ (Arizona Winter Guard) is expected to issue a ruling at the end of the season. Preliminary reports are that they will only recognize sabers, rifles and flags as equipment.

^Yeah, but how do you decide what is or is not a rifle? I've seen equipment that looks EXACTLY like a rifle (stock, barrel) but it was curved. And it wasn't legal. And sabers are curved anyway, so can you just stick a hilt on your sickle and call it a saber? This nonsense has been going on since the late 80s, and I wish they'd just make a decision and stick to it instead of deciding on a case-by-case basis. It simply CAN'T be that difficult.