It's Fun for Friday again and this week's fun idea was sent to us by Brenda Scarpati of the State of Illusion Winter Guard from Bloomfield Hills, MI.  (also on facebook ).  She gives her performers a strand of Mardi-gras style beads after each performance, tagged with the name and date of the competition.  She says they bring all their beads "to each contest and keep adding to their collection."

Here's what Brenda wrote:

"We are a brand new winter guard this year.  We are a combined team with members from the 2 high schools in our district, usually in competition WITH each other.  It's really nice to see them all come together and bring the 'best of both worlds' to the table. 

The idea of the beads grew from wanting to start new traditions for our new team, without having them come from any ideas already in place at either of the high schools.  I actually thought of the idea as I was walking around a local 'Dollar Tree' store (one of my favorite places to shop for motivational goodies!).

I saw the beads.  The students always seem to love those beads...and the price was right!  After each performance, I have a little 'bead ceremony'.  Each strand is tagged with the date and name of the event (I got small tags at the local office supply store.  You can also fold over an address label).  The performers pick a color and place it on their neck.  They bring them to each show, for each season.  Hopefully, by the time their competitive high school [career] is over, they've acquired quite a stash of beads!   A freshman could end up easily with 20-30 strands! Each one should allow them to go back and recall the memories from particular events and/or seasons."

We asked her what the students thought of the bead idea so she asked one of her freshmen, Madi Kramer, who said she likes the beads because, "it's a cool way to remember competitions."

Sounds like a fun and inexpensive way to celebrate each performance and help members visually keep track of their ever-growing performance experience.  Scarpati is also creating common traditions for this new group to help bring together students from two separate schools - definitely an important part of team management for this unique situation!  Thank you Brenda for sharing your fun idea with all of us!

If you have a great "FUN" idea for our new Friday column send them our way!  We'd love to hear how you make things fun for your performers and in sharing you can help make things fun for hundreds more students around the world!  

Have a great weekend of rehearsals and competitions.  Here in the D.C. region we have once again been snowed out!  So... for our region I suppose it's one more weekend of relaxing (while also stressing about what things will look like when we finally get back into a gym!  Gosh!). 

Happy Spinning!