The Enterprise High School JROTC Wildcat Battalion won second overall at the State of Alabama Drill Championships in Montgomery on March 9.

“We’ve been dominating and they had all ends of the state (at the competition),” JROTC Instructor Sgt. Maj. (Ret.) Gary Price said. “Sparkman (High School) from Huntsville won but it’s usually between Sparkman, Pell City (High School) and us—it just swaps around.”

The Wildcat Battalion came into the state championships off four consecutive first place wins at competitions in Greenville, Pell City and Sidney Lanier invitationals as well as first at the Fort Rucker NCO Cadet Challenge.

Price said the JROTC students easily spent 300 hours this year training for all the competitions that the battalion attends.

“You’re out there five to eight minutes for each little sequence so it’s a lot of hours put in for such a short amount of time, but that’s what it takes,” Price said. “Practice makes perfect.”

The Wildcat Battalion will head to its final competition of the season on April 6 in DeFuniak Springs, Fla., and then Price said it’s time for tryouts for the 2019-2020 year.

“Right after this competition, we’ll have a week—kind of—break and then we start tryouts for next year,” Price said. “We actually go over to both junior highs and do a recruiting trip and then we’ll have tryouts for two weeks. We normally have a big crowd coming to try out.”

Price said he’s proud of the how the cadets have performed this year.

“We’ve had a great year and they’ve performed very well,” Price said.

The individual awards for the Alabama Drill Championships is as follows:

  • 1st Place Unarmed Division;
  • 2nd Place Unarmed Regulation, commanded by Courtney Soli;
  • 1st Place Unarmed Color Guard, commanded by Amber Mayse;
  • 4th Place Armed Exhibition, commanded by Tal Audiss;
  • 2nd Place Armed Regulation, commanded by Tal Audiss;
  • 2nd Place Armed Dual Exhibition, Brice Thomas and Tucker Boswell;
  • 3rd Place Unarmed Dual Exhibition, Bri Davis and ZyAeriah Morris;
  • 1st Place Unarmed Exhibition, Courtney Soli;
  • 2nd Place PT Team A, Jake Holmes, Colby Clark, Lauren Rodgers and Daniel Babaran Sun;
  • 3rd Place PT Team B, Evan Crawford, Tristen Stratton, Nathan Schmidt and Tyler Rathburn; and,
  • 2nd Place Academic Team, commanded by Madison Grimes with team members Evan Crawford, Shani Waters and Matthew Denzine.

Thank you to The Southeast Sun for the article.