When I was in my first years of college I took a class from a man named Chris Brown. No he was not the rapper, but he did have a lot of good sayings. Being a coach now, I find many occasions to use them. He used to use words or saying that he called something like "State Changers", where if someone was crying or upset he would pull one out to break our focus long enough to realize it wasn't worth crying or being upset over.Well I got to use one this past week and it turned out quite funny, so here it is.
This picture about describes how I was feeling about our Character routine. This season for the drill team has not been ideal, and judges have not been the biggest fans of our Character routine. So we have been working endlessly, changing sections and really working to improve the routine. Before our last competition we changed about a minute and 30 seconds of the routine. Well this past week another part was just not working out. I have been feeling frustrated for some time, wishing I could just throw this routine away and start over with a whole new concept. In an attempt to keep the girls positive I was trying to hide these feelings, but it became apparent that they were already feeling the same way. They were saying things like, "Let's get rid of this..." or "Let's do take this out and put this in.." One girl even suggested getting rid of Cops and Robbers and doing an Aladdin theme. Needless to say we were all starting to lose any hope of salvaging this routine. Knowing that we had less than 3 weeks to region I knew it wasn't reasonable to start all over and knew I had to make this a positive experience. So I pulled out a Chris Brownism. I told the girls, "This is what we have got and we have got to figure out how to make it work. Starting over would be too much stress at this point. We can sit here and say, 'We should have done this or we should have done that' until we should all over ourselves...." Instantly everyone's mood changed. They were all laughing thinking I had just cursed, but then realized that I didn't. It was a really fun and good moment for us. I will let you know that we have been able to move on. We have gotten rid of a few not so good parts and put in some much better parts. We will have changed about 3/4 of the original routine... But I think/hope we are getting closer to a winning routine!
