Color guards or flag corps are teams of performers who perform choreographed dances and routines with various equipment to enhance and interpret the music of a marching band or drum and bugle corps show. Color guard teams can be found in American colleges, universities, high schools, middle schools and independent drum corps. They use various equipment including flags, non-functioning rifles, and sabres, along with other props. Most Color Guard groups are of mixed gender but some may also be single gender. They perform using their equipment (flag, rifle, saber, prop, etc.) and emotional connections (facial expressions and dance and sometimes voice) to the audience to enhance the meaning and feeling of their show. Some color guards perform with marching bands during football games at halftime. During marching band competitions, the guard adds to the overall score of the band and can be judged in many categories, including but not limited to: visual effects, general effect, auxiliary, and color guard. Color guards have since evolved into a separate activity known as winter guard, which is an indoor sport usually performed during the winter or spring, where the guard performs unaccompanied by a marching band to a piece of pre-recorded music indoors. Winter guards compete independently in circuits such as Winter Guard International (WGI), Tournament Indoor Association (TIA), or Keystone Indoor Drill Association (KIDA). There is only one nationally recognized color sorority in the United States: Phi Rho Psi National Color Guard Sorority. It was founded in 2009 at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas. History A military color guard often traveled with a band, who would play patriotic songs. This way of performing continued into the civilian marching bands, and today a marching band's color guard is usually found carrying equipment descending from those of military color guard: flags, banners, wooden rifles, and plastic or metal sabres. Modern guards use real sabers as well, but without the sharpened point. One tradition that contributed to color guards in American marching bands is the Swiss art of flag swinging or Fahnenschwingen. The 1936 Olympian Franz Hug of Lucern, Switzerland, came to America and introduced flag swinging in 1937. Leonard Haug, an assistant band director at the University of Wisconsin, was intrigued. Haug created ten flags representing the schools of the Big Ten Conference. When Haug came to the University of Oklahoma the following year, he became the first to introduce the