You work hard for hours on end. You endure heat, cold, rain, and angry instructors. Your hands hurt. Your knees hurt. You’re tired. You haven’t seen your family since drill season started. And at the end of the road is the ever-looming drill competition. Follow this advice as you head into your next drill competition. In many ways, you set yourself up for success or failure before you even hit the deck!
1. Read. The. SOP.
As soon as you’ve solidified your drill meet schedule with your instructors, you should be banging down the door asking for a copy of the SOP (standard operating procedures) or LOI (letter of instruction). This document contains all relevant information for your unit’s participation. It should outline clearly all drill cards, drill floor sizes, timing specifics, and any additional rules/regulations to follow during the competition. Even if you’ve been to the competition the year prior, you should still review the newest version before heading into competition. Team commanders should read the SOP but so should squad leaders. Squad leaders should brief their squads so it doesn’t hurt for EVERYONE on the team to have read it!
2. Ask Questions!
As you read the SOP, make a list of questions you have. Perhaps the SOP doesn’t specify when timing in exhibition starts and stops. This can be huge. If it starts at your first organized movement, your time is very different than if timing begins when the team reports in. As you make a list of these questions, compare notes with your squad leaders. Now, take your list of questions to your instructor. They may make the call to the event director and get clarification for you. They might have you make the call and request the answers to the questions as well. This a great opportunity to develop leadership and professional communication skills. Document the answers received and keep them with the SOP.
3. Run Recon!
As you arrive at the competition site, event commanders should immediately go observe their respective drill areas. By doing so, you can determine much valuable information. Is the drill area the same size as was depicted in the SOP? If not, it’s time to politely request a review of the floor size and/or entry and exit points. You can also determine the rank of the judges and properly brief the team. If the meet is multi-service, be sure to look up any rank insignias you don’t recognize. This is also a time to see how the judges are interacting with the teams currently competing. Inspection is much less stressful when you know to expect from the judges. Be sure to be professional and polite but move with a sense of urgency and take in everything you can!
4. Practice Moving To & From the Drill Areas
Good teams practice entry through exit. Great teams practice how to move to and from the drill areas so that they’re always prepared and organized in the minds of the judges. The team that commands “Dismissed!” and immediately falls out on the edge of the floor looks far less organized than the team that continues to execute organized marching movements from the time the judges first see them to the time they march away from the area. The time to wipe sweat, talk about what happened, or relax is far away from the drill area. This way, the judging corps only ever sees you locked on. You should spend time at practice simulating marching up to the drill area, falling in, and exiting the drill area so it’s not a surprise on game day!
5. Don’t Overdo It!
Many teams take on the philosophy of ramping up practice as the day of the meet draws closer. If you look at any other activity – sports, music, theater, etc. – you would see that the time leading into the competition is actually less stressful than in previous weeks/months. By the time you’re within a week or two of the competition, your focus should switch from getting everything done to cleaning everything up and spending time practicing PERFORMANCE. This means you’re doing more full maintenance runs of each card to ensure that the team is prepared to execute from start to finish. You’re doing your best to simulate performance conditions through visualization. What you AREN’T doing is pushing quite as hard – that time has come and gone. The week leading into the meet is about sustaining and maintaining the level you’ve achieved through your past weeks of hard work.
Hopefully your team is already implementing some of these items! We want to hear from you via our Facebook page, our Instagram (@drillteamdynamics), our our website here! Best of luck this season!
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