The Towson Trills
In honor of the 2017 ICCA tournament, The A Cappella Blog pursued short interviews with competing groups to develop insights into why and how groups approach competition, and to get appropriately excited for the tremendous shows ahead of us.
What’s your group name and on what date is your group’s quarterfinal?
We are The Towson Trills AKA The Trills. We are competing at JHU on February 25th and we are so excited!
How long has your group been around? Have you competed before?
We’re celebrating out one year anniversary! We have never competed before seeing as we haven’t been around very long at all but we are so excited to compete and sing with the rest of the a cappella community!
Why are you competing this year? What does your group hope to accomplish or get out of the experience?
We are competing because this is our dream and we’ve always wanted to be able to say we’ve done something as amazing as this. We want to show people that if you work hard and do what you love that you can accomplish anything. And we are definitely going to be working as hard as possible.
How is your group preparing for competition?
We are using our regularly scheduled rehearsals and are not accepting as many performance requests. Our choreographer Katie Sacha is researching previous winners of ICCAs, as well as other professional groups and is using that to help us create our own choreo style. Our music director Leroy Hyson is constantly challenging us with new techniques and honing our sound. Our beatboxer Aaron Bayne went to camp a cappella and learned beatboxing under Richard Steighner and is constantly working on new sounds for our set. Abby Reinhold is keeping our social media presence active and the rest of us are doing some behind the scenes things to keep the group running and keep our active status on campus. Harmony Reichert also attended a workshop with Deke Sharon to get some tips and tricks for competition.
If you were to describe your group, or the set your group is planning for competition with just three words, what would they be?
Three words for both our group and our set would be Epic. Passion. Party.
You can follow The Trills on all social media (Facebook/instagram/twitter/youtube) under Towson Trills