Flashback Friday - Drill Team

I saw this idea on a friend of a friend's blog and since I was toying with the idea of doing a weekly themed post anyway, it seemed like a good fit. Every Friday (or as often as possible) we will post a flashback, something Brent and/or I are being nostalgic about that current week.

This week, thanks to all of the So You Think You Can Dance I have been watching, I am remembering the 2 years I did drill team and cheerleading for the little league football team back in Texas. Football is practically a religion in the south and in the area I grew up in there was a league of 12 different teams starting as young as 8 years old. Let me point out it is full contact football, full pads and all. They are all named after NFL teams, and the team for the district I lived in was The Broncos.

Each football team has it's own cheer team (we were the Pony Express) and we would have 2.5 hour practices 2 times a week and cheer and dance at the Saturday football games and at the end of the season we had our own drill team competition where we danced in several different categories (pom, military, jazz, novelty, etc). It was pretty hard core for being 11. If you are asking yourself, what the heck is a drill team?, here are some youtube videos of random drill teams doing pom and high kick. It's a huge thing in Texas and the dancing is actually quite amazing. The team from my high school, the Bearkadettes, often wins national competitions.

Anyway, here are the pictures from the 2 years I was a Pony (3rd & 6th grade). The registration fee was pretty hefty and there was a fund raiser you had to do as well or the parents would have to pay another fee and the parents all had to put in 5 volunteer hours, or again, there were fees. We didn't have much money growing up but my parents knew how much my sister and I wanted to do this so they designed and made the uniforms. I'm not sure if they started doing that my first year, but by the time I did my last year, my sister had done several years of it and they would make the 80+ uniforms, by hand, tailored to fit each girl. It would take weeks and hundreds and hundreds of hours, and our dining room would be covered in blue and orange fabric but it was either that, or we'd have to come up with about $300 per girl or just not do it. Thanks Dad and Linda! I think they helped with the competition costumes as well, which were usually big gaudy things with lots of sequins.

Enjoy! And just remember that this was Texas in the 90's so big hair and bright lipstick were in. Oh wait, they still are...