Southwind packed their busses and rolled out of Plymouth High School on the night of July 29. They left the northern Indiana town with an accomplishment, a milestone the corps hadn’t hit in nearly two years.
The Mobile, Alabama corps topped 70 points in Plymouth — their third-to-last show before the DCI Open Class World Championships in Marion, Indiana. The corps hadn’t topped 70 points since the 2017 Open Class Finals.
After an inactive period from 2008-2014, Southwind has slowly been rebuilding its foundation. It started back up in 2014 as a SoundSport team before making the transition into an Open Class corps a year later.
After finishing ninth and 10th, respectively, in the 2017 and 2018 Open Class Finals, Southwind skyrocketed up to fifth Tuesday night in Marion with a score of 75.683. The drastic upswing helped earn the corps the honor of 2019’s Most Improved Open Class Corps, awarded Tuesday night on the field of Wildcat Stadium at Indiana Wesleyan University.
“It was nice to be recognized, it really was,” Southwind director Lawrence LeClaire said. “Because of all of our hard work coming back from nothing. Getting that is a nice way to get recognized.”
Southwind
Added drum major Rhianna Zaidan: “I'm so excited. We have one member now who's been with Southland since they came back and it's been a crazy experience for him. He's seen it grow every single year.”
Zaiden has been with the corps for the last two seasons. She hasn’t seen the complete transformation of the corps. That’s fine, she doesn’t need to have the full history to understand the drastic improvement of Southwind in 2019.
“Oh, it's so different,” she said. “It's so far beyond what it was. It's due to a lot of things. I think the people the attitude, the leadership, the staff, it's awesome.”
Southwind has a diverse age group. A handful of its members are approaching the 11th hour of their drum corps career; others are just getting started. Zaiden, a veteran, was quick to admit a majority of the corps was a bit confused with what the drum corps experience was like.
After two weeks on tour, they started to grasp it.
Southwind
“So once they started understanding, really, what we're doing — that this is about competition, but also about meeting new people and growing as an individual — it's just grown so much,” Zaiden said. “It's almost like there was a turning point, I think back when we were in New Hampshire, it just clicked. I think it clicked for a lot of people.”
Southwind’s 2019 production, “Caged,” observes the reality of people being caged in — both psychically, like those in jail, and mentally. It goes through the mindset of someone in that position, running through their emotions of trying to get out, believing whole-heartedly they will get out, losing hope and then aggressively trying to break out before they become free.
“It's a really neat theme because it's adaptable. You can't completely see it by the eye,” Zaiden said. “You could be caged mentally, emotionally, something that happens in your life. The audience can adapt it to themselves and their own story as well as the members.”
The show may go down as the epitome of Southwind’s resurgence in drum corps. It’s a reality that has driven the group to make the show and the corps the absolute best it can be.