Big Ten Flags
The Big Ten Flag Corps is a pre-game and parade tradition in the Spartan Marching Band. Members carry large banner type flags on lance poles, which salute the twelve universities in the Big Ten Conference. The section consists of dedicated, hard-working and athletic individuals who carry out unique traditions that exhibit the style and form of the Spartan Marching Band.
The Big Ten Flag Corps comprises two squads. The section leader, who carries the Michigan State flag leads the squad consisting of the Minnesota, Indiana, Northwestern, Iowa and Ohio State flags. The squad leader carries the Michigan flag and leads the squad consisting of the Illinois, Nebraska, Penn State, Purdue and Wisconsin flags. Members audition once during pre-season and a second time during the middle of the season for flag placement. The section leader and squad leader evaluate members for flag placement. Members are evaluated on performance of the Series, fundamentals and Prancing.
Flags are not ranked; however each flag has a specific role dependent upon their position in the block. For example, typically the Ohio State flag and Wisconsin flag are held by good prancers because that position requires the individual to travel the furthest during pre-game, while Penn State is in the center of the squad and therefore requires an individual with good 8 to 5 marching.
Read more about this topic: Michigan State University Spartan Marching Band, Gameday Traditions
Famous quotes containing the words big, ten and/or flags:
“Haggerty: Girls! Girls! Girls! Be careful of my hats.
Chorus Girl: Well, we gotta get down on the stage.
Haggerty: I don’t care. I won’t allow you to ruin them.
Dressing Room Matron: See, I told you. They were too high and too wide.
Haggerty: Well, Big Woman, I designed the costumes for the show, not the doors for the theater.
Dressing Room Matron: I know that. If you had, they’d have been done in lavender.”
—James Gleason (1886–1959)
“Mix salt and sand, and it shall puzzle the wisest of men, with his mere natural appliances, to separate all the grains of sand from all the grains of salt; but a shower of rain will effect the same object in ten minutes.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats ... these are the facts.”
—Alexander Trocchi (1925–1983)