In recognition of Winter Guard International World Championships being held in San Diego this week, we'll be focusing some editorial firepower on anecdotes and stories related to guards. Think back to those formative, funny, inspiring or memorable guard stories and send them in! They can be as long or as short as you would like. Attach
a picture of yourself or the situation you're writing about if you can. And
by all means, pass this on to your guard friends! We'll edit these stories
for clarity, grammar and appropriateness. If you have a guard-related anecdote or story, send it to content@dci.org.

Giovanni De Torres
Giovanni De Torres, guard captain of the Blue Devils, sent in this moment: ^"Last summer (2003), I'm not sure of the location or the stadium, right before we (the Blue Devils) were going to go onto the field to perform, our instructor came back to talk to us after being interviewed. I forgot the details, but as the story went on, the person who interviewed our instructor either misread his or her notes, or didn't have a clue of who we were. So he or she just called us the Concord Hoot Owls. From then on, our instructor officially gave us the code name "the Hoot Owls," and every time we said it, we would all hoot like owls."