Carmel High School Winter Guard is bringing home the world championship trophy for their performance of Stay Foolish, Stay Hungry.

Their methods are hardly foolish, and they are surrounded by too many supportive families to ever have to go hungry.  But their interpretation of the show was the driving force in achieving their goal, and in teaching others the message through their movements.

A united team of 34 girls backed by families making costumes, nursing injuries and cheering them through struggles went into last week’s world finals undefeated.  They’d been there three times before, but this year they had something different.  They had a pattern of what life is about, and they were there to express it through music and artful athleticism.

They had perfected their performance with practice and successful performances, but the true perfection came from high school girls, most not even 18, already understanding life while remembering it is something we won’t have one day.

Their inspiration came from Steve Jobs’ commencement speech titled “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” at Stanford University.  The beginning of his speech said, “Life is about finding how the dots connect, trusting they will connect and understanding you can only see their connection by looking backward.”

He said he was only there to tell three stories about love, life, and death.  Like many, he had experienced all three by age 40, and it took that to learn how the dots in his life were connected.  A group of 15-18 year olds’ united passion for winter guard and trust in one another has brought out an old soul in all of them, making a group of teens wise beyond their years and more grateful for their shared experiences and ambitious teamwork than a trophy.

Lisa Dye’s freshman daughter is on the team and she says the leadership and commitment the girls have for each other has made a tremendous impact on her daughter.

“When you’re on a team or in a family, you’re reminded there’s something bigger than yourself and with that comes opportunities to be accountable to yourself and to other people,” Dye said.  “My daughter joined the team as a little girl and now, in just one year, she’s matured into a young woman.”

Her 15-year-old daughter, Emily says she sees life with different eyes since her very first performance with the team.

“I was nervous for the first one and it didn’t go great; there were things I could’ve done better, but the older members were encouraging us throughout our entire performance, they gave us the chance to believe in ourselves,” Emily said.

Emily said when she first started she only knew two people on the team, and she was still trying to learn how to budget her time with her family, homework and intense practices.  But it was the older girls’ dedication to believing in her that made her not give up.

“We’d go through hard times while being exhausted from the intense training; sometimes it felt like it wasn’t going anywhere,” Emily said.  “Now, to have the chance to look back and see what we did and how rewarding it is to see this kind of ending is a really cool feeling.  It has really taught me when you’re working hard with a group people we can do anything together and that makes us want to work even harder now.”

At just 15, she and the rest of the team see deeper than the surface shimmer of their world championship trophy.  Like any winning team, they have a sense of pride seeing Carmel High School next to world champions, but when one of them sees their reflection in their trophy’s golden sheen, they see a team that was able to connect the dots.  They see 34 girls capable of embracing each others’ pasts while finding the dots in all of their lives.

After, they strapped on their all black costumes with one white line to symbolize the line that connects each member’s dots so audiences can see how a team trusting each other can lead to finding the true pattern of life.

Like Steve Jobs said, it’s all about looking backward to see your dots so you can move forward to connect them.

One of the team’s youngest members thought the same way when she held the trophy:

“Having the chance to look back and see what we came from is what made winning amazing,” Emily said.

By Lindsay Eckert Current in Carmel

Reprinted with permission, Current Publishing, LLC, copyright 2011.