Bringing excitement to the stage is Pizzazz’s specialty, and on Feb. 27 in O’Fallon, the team took home (almost) everything; Pizzazz got first place in choreography, band, vocals, and grand champion .
But the group didn’t expect the win, especially since the day before the competition group members said they had a pretty rough rehearsal.
“Since the day before the competition we had a really bad rehearsal, we all went into competition like ‘Alright, we’ve got to get our stuff together,’” senior Jennifer Wade said. “We all thought in the back of our minds that this wasn’t going to be it, and we were all kind of down on ourselves, so when we did win, it was shocking to us, but Silvermintz wasn’t surprised at all.”
With that final practice not going as planned, choir director Ben Silvermintz was harder on the group in hopes Pizzazz would rise to the potential that he claimed they all had.
“It was probably necessary to give us the edge that we needed,” sophomore Chase Coleman said. “We needed to be pushed to do the best, and Mr. Silvermintz being hard on us was not him being mean; it was him being motivational.”
Many members of the group felt they had let their director down in their performances that week and wanted to prove to him they could do better.
“It hurt us that we hurt our teacher, and that he knows we can do better and we knew that we could do better,” Wade said. “That gave us a drive to want to take it all.”
That drive took them to the top, where their name just kept getting called at the awards ceremony.
“The announcing of the awards progressively got better and was more and more surprising,” junior Will Harold said. “We were overjoyed that we won everything.”
With the success of the group there were more struggles with the last performance than just with the last practice. Senior Dominique Tolliver had to stand up and sing his solo of “Man in the Mirror” with a busted ankle and avoid all of the dance numbers.
“I wasn’t able to really perform,” Tolliver said. “I was able to come on for our ballad, but after that, I had to leave.”
With lack of interest in pizzazz from the upcoming grades, this year is the last year that pizzazz will be a group and next year it will transition into jazz choir.
“We tried not to make it too big of a deal that it was our last competition ever,” sophomore Sophie Orlet said. “Silvermintz told us to save our emotions until we were on stage so we would have more meaning to our performance. We were really determined to make this last one our best one.”
Hard work and detication paid off for the group as they were victorious in their preformance.
“We won grand champion and that was just amazing it was basically a fairytale ending,” Tolliver said.