Hey everyone. I noticed that someone had posted that this board was dead so I decided to start a fun new topic.

What are some things that your guard instructors or coaches or even captains do that just drive you insane? Not enough water breaks? Making you start over again and again?? etc.

I'm curious because I've been on both sides and had little pet peeves and would be mad at myself when I did them when I taught!!

One thing that actually made me pretty mad sometimes was that our instructors would have lower standards than I would. The instructors should expect more from their guard, not the captain you know? But I'm a drum corps kid so maybe I'm just expecting too much from a high school guard since I'm used to being in corps, but I don't know. It would really annoy me. Another thing they did was just not even care if they saw people slacking off or sitting around talking, which i would never let them do. They were just too relaxed with us and let us get away with waaaay more than we should.

One of my instructors has this thing about explaining EVERYTHING to the fullest. So right after we learn new work, he goes through everything count by count and even half counts sometimes! It drives me insane! He will also take like an hour to go through 16 counts, and thats not because of us, its because he wants it perfect.

^I always go through work by half-counts - and sometimes by quarter-counts depending on the tempo. I expect my kids to know every checkpoint for every half-count of their entire show. That's pretty much standard procedure for any decent competitive guard.

I could understand that. it just makes me crazy because I get very bored after awhile. I do relize though it's necessary for us because we are competitive.

Like someone else said, I hated it when instructors have lower standards for the guard than I, a performer, did. If I'm going to hold myself and my performance to my highest expectations, so should the people above me.

my pet peeve was when the teacher from the elementary school guard[we all practiced at the same time in the same building] would come over and do movement across the floor with us, what bothered me so much is that she treated us like we were the little kid guard, taking 5-10 minutes to teach us the movements we already knew, she would go into every little detail about it, and make us do it over and over before we actually got to do it across the floor. We already knew how to do them for months. It wasted time and energy that could've been spent on other things, like our show.

Having my coaches give up on us and "dumbing down" moves. They will teach us these really fun complicated new moves but one or two people won't get it right away and they automatically give up on doing the move in a show and go back to something simple. They don't really give the people who don't understand right away to practice and get it. To a certain extent I understand this, that if not everyone can do it than you shouldn't do it in a show because you want a routine everyone can perform at it's best. However I just get annoyed that they hardly give us a chance to learn it, maybe a few minutes then just move on to something that they know we can all do. So we don't get that many new moves in a show because many new ones are taken out to go back to basic moves.
I just wish we could be challenged and get a new difficult move to master, instead of sort of getting a glimpse of it and then just forgetting about it.

We have multiple instructors, and i hate it when one will say something and when cleaning the work later, another instructor will say something different. I also hate it when one day an instructor will tell you that your doing something excellent and even use you as an example and the next day yell at you and basically tell you that its horrible. I also hate it when the instructors punish the whole guard for one person's mistake. I understand why they do it, but still it drives me insane!

well i do winter guard, but i probably have the sam pet peeves:
1- we have to run a lot (and i hate wearing sneakers)
2- instructors have poor dance technique ( i was a dancer long before i was a guard girl)
3- no consequences for the girls who "forget" to come to practice

My biggest one was when instructors would say "one more time" and you knew that meant about 10 more times at least. It'd have been nicer if they just said again haha. I think we even had some jokes about this on our t-shirts one year, so apparently it was a pet peeve of everyone, not just me.

I also hated when we had to subdivide out loud with warm up exercises, like drop spins lol. I just thought it sounded stupid, even though it did help.

I'm sure there are more I could write about, but I gotta get ready for class.

My pet peeve is when my coach will yell at us and take off 5 points for being late or missing a practice when she skips practices, football games, and even a couple compititons herself. I love my coach to death, she's like my second mom, but she can be really hypocritical sometimes.

Another thing is that she never repremends anyone for serious things. This year we have had some major drama which led to violence( one girl beat another with a swing flag, and another two got into a physical fight at a football game) and no one was repremended for thier behavior. These girls should have been reported to the principal, or at least our band director, or at the very least gotten a warning, but she didn't do anything.

^uh wow! I'm surprised no one knew about it. That's something they could get fired over if someone would have gotten hurt

I've only been spinning for one year, and there are only four girls in our guard. We got a new instructor this year because our old one lived too far away to drive everyday. She (the new instructor) was a spinner in college and got the job because she was from a different school in the area and our director thought she'd ring new moves and dances to the guard. She cleared her schedule so we could clean moves for four weeks this summer, which she ended up cancelling all of, she even skipped band camp, which is a huge HUGE no-no for us because she wanted to write our routines instead of letting our captain. So we show up at band camp with out any routines and no instructor. We kinda wrote our own first show & pre game with a graduated spinner who came to visit for a week, our new insturctor eventually came back and we had a practice two weeks after band camp, where s he decided she was going to change our ENTIRE show and expected us to learn five routines in an hour, plus pregame. We argued for about fifteen minutes with her because of how long we spent on the show, we eventually gave up knowing we could talk to our director. She then decided to tell us that we couldn't talk the rest of the practice but we had to sit and listen to her tell us about her summer with DCI. three days later she was fired. and we ended up going into the season with no coach for three weeks. Our temporary instructor from band camp ended up getting the job and we had a spectacular season! ut yea, that coach was a huge pet peeve of not only me, but the other three in my guard.
(sorry it's so long, you need the whole story to understand how bad it was)

1. Not giving enough time to reset on the practice field before wanting us to do it again. As the shortest person on guard by a good 6 inches (I'm under 5 feet) with the longest to run (96 yds in 32 VERY, VERY fast tempo beats) with a flag pole that is more than twice my height, you have to give me at least a couple of seconds to walk back across the field and catch my breath.
2. Not get mad when I was two minutes late to practice because it was raining so hard (that even with my windshield wipers going as fast as they can I can't see even the front of my car) that I had to pull over so I didn't get into a wreck. Heck, I was the third person there that morning and the only guard member. No one else on guard got in trouble.
3. Giving our captains credit for the work I did. Every time they were asked to do somthing, like get us warmed up, they would look at me cluelessly and I would have to take over. "Good work captains!" was all that was heard.

What I really hate is when you're really close to a competition, amd you're cleaning your routines, and this one person is doing something wrong. And they've been doing it wrong since you learned the routine. So you try to tell them and they don't listen and you ask your director how that count is supposed to be, and the person doesnt even listen to anyone. And i hate it when you've just done a run-through of your show, and the director gives a tip to the whole guard that is meant for just one person because he/she's afraid to call them out. It would be better if they just told the person upfront. otherwise, the don't realize it's them.

^creepy.

My pet peeve is when the person making the routine, doesn’t understand music. As in he or she will make a routine purely on counts and moves they like, and won’t even consider if it goes with the music.

This wasn’t that surprising in my high school guard, we didn’t have any instructor besides the band director, who was no help, and we made our own routines (we only did parade so it wasn’t terrible). But when I joined the guard at my college it surprised me. The instructor was good, but he couldn’t be there for a while (for a very legitimate reason)so one of the members decided to make the routine themselves, and I was just astonished at how it didn’t go with the music at all! And she was really amazing at guard too, much better then myself!

I hate when instructors skip out on you in the middle of the season, or when the choreographers don't finish the choreography, or when the whole group is punished for one person's mistake....or when your instructor is the same age as you and tries to act like they're so much more mature.

Okay I have a new pet peeve.

Since we're nearing the end of our season our coach is making us wear our shoes for every practice, and I completely understand why, but our shoes are just so annoying!

^We had to do that once in winter. We had split soled jazz shoes and we had to keep wearing them at practice and I hated them. But, I guess they make you do that for a reason even though it's not fun.