Laura Bowden
Anyone that tried to search the Southern Connecticut State University website for the colorguard would see: information coming soon.
A new club sport to SCSU, the colorguard, who accompany the drumline adding flag routines to the beat of the music during parades and other events ,has only been in operation since December of last year, according to assistant professor of music and advisor to the student colorguard organization, Craig Hlavac.
“The group was started about a year ago—the first performance was December of last year and then we did our second performance at Commencement last year,” said Hlavac. “We are hoping to get the group together for the home-coming which is in two weeks.”
Although Hlavac is the advisor to the organization, he said it was the captain of the team who really took the initiative to get things started in the first place.
Laura Delosier, sophomore athletic training major, who according to Hlavac, had the vision and took the reins in leading the movement of the first colorguard known to SCSU.
“I was strongly committed to the colorguard as captain in my junior and senior year in high school and wanted to continue it,” said Delosier. “When I got to Southern I was disappointed that there wasn’t a colorguard organization. My parents suggested that I start one and I started to think and thought—maybe I should.”
Delosier said she then went to speak with Hlavac in order to get things started and had a few meetings about it before her goal became a reality.
“Hlavac had thoughts on how the structure of the organization should be set up and wanted to start
us off by keeping us in sync with the drum line,” said Delosier. “I was happy with this because that is where my experiences had been with in the past, which made it easy to start it off.”
According to Hlavac, there was interest from various students in previous years and this is the first time anyone (Delosier) made it clear that starting the colorguard at Southern had to be done.
“What interests me is that there is an additional visual aspect to the drum line performance itself with the colorguard and I like what it’s able to create as a whole,” said Hlavac.
Hlavac was originally the advisor to the drum line and said his progression into the colorguard was a
natural one since the two are so closely related.
“In time we would like to accompany the drum line in competitions. It will take time to get organized but we are hopeful for the future,” said Hlavac.
Sophomore physiology major Lauren Bryant, a member of the SCSU colorguard since the team started last year said, “I was into music and art but wasn’t ever very good at either. The colorguard gave me an opportunity to do something in music without actually having to play instruments.”
Bryant had decided to join colorguard on a whim in high school and stayed with it for three years.
She said when she got to college she was at first disappointed since she didn’t think SCSU had a colorguard team and was excited the day she received an email through the SCSU events saying that they had decided to start one and were looking for members.
“All of the girls are nice so it’s great to be in a group with all nice people who just seem to always get along,” said Bryant. “Each member of the team gets to come up with an eight second part of the team’s eight count routine—in high school I never got to do that so I am excited that we get to do it here.”
Hlavac and Delosier both said that the team’s goal is to add to their membership and make people more aware of what they do at SCSU.
As far as team improvements are concerned, “diversity with routines and the amount of people we have are the main goals; we want to make ourselves more well-known on campus,” said Delosier.
