Photo by Sterling Greback

Francisco Rodriguez, 12, and Jorge Trevino, 12, say goodbye to JROTC after participating for four years together.

After participating in JROTC for four straight years together, seniors Francisco Rodriguez, Special Projects Officer, and Jorge Trevino, Battalion Officer, performed in their last drill-meet of their JROTC high school careers.

The JROTC Armed Drill Team went to the United States Army Drill Competition in Louisville, Kentucky on Sat. April 11. Armed Drill Regulation won fifth place, Color Guard Division won fourth and the Armed Exhibition Drill won eighth then seventeenth in the Armed Inspection Phase which earned them fifth place overall in the U.S. 57 other schools from around the nation also competed with participation from over 1,000 cadets.

“When we got the trophy at first we felt disappointed, but we talked about it afterward and realized it wasn’t your everyday meet, it was the nationals,” Rodriguez said. “We didn’t just get fifth place at a competition, we were fifth place out of the entire United States.”

Rodriguez comes up and assists with projects that help gets the army out of the school and raises awareness for the JROTC program. Trevino takes charge of the program. He helps plan for events like the military ball and field day and comes up with decisions. These efforts certainly guided the team, mainly of sophomores, to reach this point, and it was their first competition at the national level.

“In the back of my mind I knew that we’d been training hard, and it would be like any other meet but at higher standards,” Trevino said.

They have new officers reserved for next year’s team to replace Jorge Trevino and Francisco Rodriguez and plan to win the JROTC Armed Drill Team next year because of its potential strength.

“For our first time competing at a national level, we did really good,” Trevino said. “It was tense because we were going against people who had been doing it for a while.”

Trevino and Rodriguez’s leadership gave Sergeant Smith the confidence in their program to be successful in a competition, but at the national stage.

“I would’ve never taken our guys that far if I didn’t feel that they would have finished as high as they did,” Sergeant Smith said.”

Considering it wasn’t an ordinary competition, the JROTC program takes pride in their award because they can say they are “fifth in the nation.”

“I feel it was a great accomplishment to finish in the top 10 and we finished number five,” Sergeant Smith said. “For our guys to finish fifth overall, that was amazing.”