At the 2014 National High School Drill Team Championship, the John Jay High School Varsity Silver Eagles didn't land as high as they hoped.
"Last year, unfortunately, we came up fourth overall," said Giovanni Urbina, a junior at John Jay High School.
So they set their sights higher.
"This year, our mission was to win first," Urbina said.
What would it take to land first?
“It was a whole year of nothing but grinding it out,” Urbina said.
"When we got back to John Jay, the kids decided, ‘Hey, look, this is what we want to do,’” said James A. Henry Jr., coach of the Silver Eagles. “We felt we should have been, you know, first, and so they decided they were going to work really, really hard and they were going dedicate themselves to try to win a national championship."
The team re-focused and spent hours practicing day in and day out.
"We practice from 4:05 to 6:30 Monday through Friday, 8 to 12 on Saturday and sometimes 8 to 2, and we have approximately seven to eight drill meets that we try to go do during the course of the year,” Henry said.
"We worked our butts off all year, we won every competition we went to around locally and when we went to grand nationals, proved that were a force to be reckoned with,” Urbina said.
It was a first-place win that proves a year of hard work and dedication really does pay off.