THE THOUSANDS CLUB

by Marc Preston Moss
founder of On Color Guard


A few years ago, I was working with eight guards in the same season. That’s two rehearsals a day and more than two hundred miles round trip each! You want to talk about time management – sometimes I was late to my latter rehearsal because of traffic. I needed something to buy me some more time. Knowing that the difference between Box Three (Knowledge) and Box Four (Understanding) is a degree of familiarity between the general and specific details of skills, I decided to try something to achieve within my students a higher degree of familiarity with our technical syllabus: The Thousands Club.

Very simply put, we gave our students a list of skills we wanted them to achieve and asked them to record in a journal one thousand ATTEMPTS at that skill. Once a week, I would look at the students’ journals and see what they were doing and attempted to reconcile the problems I saw in their apparent progress with what was going on in their daily routines. At first, things didn’t seem to change much. It looked a lot like it had prior to this new idea. But, after about 500 for each student I saw something beginning to happen. Their ability to make subtle changes from my corrections was happening with a greater degree of ease than in years past.

With weapon, the equipment is handled in what I call “kinetic flow”. That means that the equipment is mostly in a state of movement and must be controlled as it moves in gradations of speed. Unlike flag which is mostly “static flow” (which means that you can stop and hold each position of the equipment aside from tosses), the weapon must be finessed into new directions and speeds by a delicate process of loosening and tightening of grips, flexibilities in the wrist, lifting of the forearm and so on. These processes are very clumsy for a novice. The reason is that the beginner is still seeing the object of cognition as the rifle. Their minds are focused more on the equipment than on their hands. The more familiarity they develop in these kinetic flow moments, the more the mind starts to marry both hand and weapon almost as one object.

Having a technical training syllabus for the basic motor skills involved in basic weapon manipulation and choreography is primary. Then, developing a regimen for the students in rehearsals is necessary to identify the individual’s responsibility within the ensemble and creating the ensemble’s style and methodologies together. However, if left to rehearsals alone, it is unlikely that an ensemble will be able to advance to intermediate and advanced skills. Think about it like this (as I have said to my students): if it takes a thousand attempts before you can make more subtle changes in developing technique to a higher state of clarity, and you throw only twenty tosses isolated in a basics block during rehearsals, and you have two to three rehearsals a week – how long will it take to be able to make the necessary subtle adjustments?

The Thousands Club proved to be a success. We were able to get the first round of thousands on all of our tosses within a month. After the first month, most of my students could adjust their hands appropriately as I would correct them. Two of my Open Class winter guards were to compete at the same location for the first show of the season…and they tied for GOLD!

Part 2 >>>