JROTC earns top state honors

PALMER — The drill teams for Colony High School’s JROTC — or Junior Officers Training Corps — program should be feeling pretty good about themselves right about now.

On Saturday, Alaska JROTC programs met at Service High School in Anchorage for their state competition.

“There’s seven competitive events,” said the Colony program’s instructor, First Sgt. David Gogert. “Of those seven competitive events we came back with a total of six trophies.”

But that’s not all. That performance means the team essentially won the competition, therefore Colony is now the current home of the state’s traveling trophy. And there’s an eighth award to boost the team’s spirits.

“Most importantly, we won the GPA award, the academic award,” Gogert said, which is based on how his students are doing in their other classes at high school. “They had the best grades, which of course is what it’s all about.”

Gogert been at Colony since 1993.

“In all the years I’ve been doing this, this is the best they’ve ever done,” Gogert said. “This took it one step up, it really did.”

And it’s not like he’s got an abnormally seasoned group of kids, either. Yes, the major leaders are juniors and seniors, but the majority of the students are underclassmen.

Gogert said Colony’s JROTC program — the only one in the Valley — is an Army program, but other competitors in the competition were Air Force or Navy programs.

To do the drills at the necessary level of precision, he said, takes a lot of work.

“There’s a specific series of movements that have to be executed and they have to be executed in a certain manner and a certain sequence,” he said. “We start practicing actually in September for the exhibition teams.”

The teams practice in the morning and at night. That they’re willing to get to school at 6 a.m., he said, says a lot about his students’ dedication.

“If you’ve never seen a teenager a 6 in the morning, it’s a sight to behold,” Gogert said.

He said they competed three times this year — the other contests were on Jan. 19 and Feb. 5, respectively.

And there’s a lot more to JROTC than competitions — the kids participate in service projects like helping out at the recycling center. They work with disaster preparedness groups, and they work as the color guard for the U.S. and state flags at public events.

“We require that because of the citizenship aspect,” Gogert said. “Really, that’s what the Corps is all about — it’s about citizenship.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.