Leah Chapin

I am on the drill team at Hidden Valley. I was 14 and we had a pep rally on Friday for the Homecoming Game the same day. The band teacher wanted us to learn a new dance with their new music and I knew that was too little time to learn a new dance. 

            After school on Tuesday our coach said, “The band teacher wants us to learn a new dance for the pep rally on Friday.” Some people were sick and weren’t there to learn the dance and since our coach only comes Tuesday she had an idea of filming it on one of our phones so we would have it to go back and watch. On Wednesday, we had everyone at practice and taught it to the ones who hadn’t learned it yet and critique it. On Thursday, our captains gave us our spots for where we would be standing for the pep rally. We didn’t get to practice the dance much because we had to march down to the field for preparation for the parade the next day, which was fine with me because I love the smell of the air outside and the feeling of grass beneath my feet. The band played the new song and we danced along with it, it was actually pretty good at least that’s what I thought. On Friday, it was the longest day of my life to get to fourth block but it finally came around and I was a nervous wreck. Before we went out I could hear all the people talk. When we were getting ready to go out I was going over the dance in my head but when I got out there my nerves took over. I was thinking to myself, “I wish I had practiced a lot more.” I could see everyone’s eyes glued on me waiting for a mistake. We looked at each other to see what we were supposed to be doing but no one knew it and we were looking at each other like, “What are we supposed to be doing?” We ended up winging it and it didn’t look horrible because we were doing the same thing but I just wished that we would have had more time.

After the pep rally we only had about twenty minutes left of school, so the band just hanged out till we would go to section dinner, which is just your section going to bond and have a good time. The drill team went to one of the seniors houses.  When we got to her house it smelled like freshly made pizza I was so hungry I was ready for dinner. We had pizza, salad, fruit, and cookies. It was the perfect dinner it had the taste of the citrus in the fruit, the greasy, cheesy goodness and then the sweetness of the cookie it just went so perfectly together.

Now that I look back on that day, I just keep replaying it in my head over and over again and just laugh at myself for how humiliating it was. But I guess we all come to a point in our life where we humiliate ourselves.