Fans fill Kenan Memorial Stadium, eager for kickoff. The smell of popcorn wafts through the air. After the drumline begins to play, nearly 300 members of the Marching Tar Heels run onto the field. But only one is the star of the show.
Makenzie Snyder is UNC-Chapel Hill’s lone baton twirler. Wearing a sequined white leotard, she leaps across the field, flipping and gracefully sending her baton soaring into the air. Sometimes she tosses three batons, her trademark move. Sometimes the batons are on fire.
Often UNC-CH football fans tell Snyder, a junior psychology major, that her routine looks effortless. But she says performing at her skill level has been anything but easy.
For 13 years, Snyder practiced daily for hours, often at the University of Maryland or the Washington Redskins’ FedEx Field near her home in Maryland. Snyder competed with the nation’s elite twirling squad and won two international championships at ages 12 and 15. She also ran a global charity called Children to Children that provides duffel bags and stuffed animals to foster children.
“I always like challenges,” Snyder says.
GOING FOR GOLD
Snyder’s straight blond hair shows at its roots a hint of the darker shade it used to be, paralleling her journey from competitive to recreational baton twirling. While Snyder talks passionately about performing at halftime, she is less fond of the competitive years from her past.
“If I had a kid, I would not have them do baton twirling, at least to that level,” Snyder says. “(In competitions) you have to be perfect at every moment. Being perfect and constantly judged at age four is not my idea of fun.”
A native of Bowie, Md., Snyder started twirling when she was four years old. She began competing in more than 20 competitions a year for two different twirling organizations. When Snyder went to her first national competition at age seven, she won a gold medal.
Snyder competed in every event, as an individual and with a team, at the national competitions.
“(At competitions) I’ve twirled from 7 o’clock in the morning till 3 o’clock in the morning,” Snyder says. “And you have to come back at 6 o’clock in the morning for the next day.”
After becoming an international champion at age 12, Snyder became famous for her skill.
“I’ve won every event at (the state level) since I was seven,” she says. “People would come in just because they knew I was performing.”
Encore, an elite twirling team based in California and Ohio, recruited Snyder when she was 13. She was the youngest person on the team; the next youngest was 21.
Every Friday after school, Snyder’s father drove her to the airport to fly by herself to California or Ohio. The next day she would rehearse for 13 to 17 hours with Encore.
“You can’t sit down,” she says. “If you’re tired, you have to keep going. And if you dropped the baton, you would have to do that trick 10 times in a row until you didn’t drop it.”
After a red-eye flight Sunday, she would arrive back in Maryland at 7 a.m. and drive straight to school.
“You really had to grow up quick,” she says. “When you’re 13…being around adults all the time, they don’t want to hear about your problems. So it was all about baton and being on your ‘A game.’
“I never really got to go to people’s birthday parties, because I was always so busy.”
MaKenzie Snyder leaps with baton in hand in the McCorkle Place Quad on campus. Snyder competed for 13 years as an elite national and international baton twirler. photo by Nicole Johnson
MAKING THE CUT
By the time Snyder was 17, her competition schedule had worn her out. She stopped twirling and focused on school, not picking up the baton again until the summer after her freshman year at UNC-CH. Snyder saw the marching band perform at a football game and was inspired to twirl again.
“I was just like, ‘I want to be out there,’” she says.
But the band hadn’t had a majorette for almost 10 years, according to Jeff Fuchs, director of University Bands. He hadn’t found someone good enough.
“Football fans can be cruel, and if you get out there and drop (the baton), they’re going to be pointing and laughing,” he says. “I’m not going to put anybody out there unless they’re amazing.”
Fuchs tested Snyder’s composure during her audition. She had to create a routine for the pregame show, perform it in McCorkle Place with a large audience—he invited everyone in the music building to watch—and perform it again immediately.
It was blazing hot outside, and Snyder had never performed on grass before. But she didn’t drop the baton once. The position became hers.
Now she choreographs a new halftime routine each week. Her routines are much simpler than her competition routines. Football fans wouldn’t recognize the difficulty of more complex tricks, she says, and she would be more likely to drop the baton doing harder moves.
Snyder says working with a band provides new challenges, but she still prefers it to competitions.
“You just get to have fun with it,” she says. “When I was competing, it was all stressful, high tension.”
Jennifer Sullivan, the parent of a UNC-CH student, likes to watch Snyder perform at football games. Sullivan was a Florida State University majorette in 1981-83, and she says Snyder impresses her.
“I practiced my whole young adult life, and I could never learn to do some of the things that she’s doing.”
LENDING A HAND
While Snyder says she may coach baton twirlers after graduation, her real dream is to become a social worker. When she was seven, she and her two older brothers were invited to participate in the International Children’s Summit in Paris after raising money for a local fire department. She met two other participants at the event who were foster children.
“They had to carry their stuff in trash bags when they moved from home to home, and they had been transferred through about 13 different homes in their life,” she says. “It was just really sad and appalling to me.”
Snyder told her parents that she wanted to help similar foster children. So her family began collecting duffel bags and stuffed animals from yard sales to donate to the children.
“I always said trash bags are for trash, not for kids to carry their stuff in,” Snyder says.
Snyder and her family hadn’t expected the organization, which she called Children to Children, to get very big. But Freddie Mac, a U.S. government-sponsored enterprise that purchases mortgages, heard about Snyder’s idea and invited the seven-year-old to discuss it in front of its board of executives.
“For me to meet with the top 20 guys in the federation was a huge honor,” Snyder says, “and, (while seated), I couldn’t even reach the floor with my feet.”
As Snyder talked about her idea, the executives were in tears. They gave her a $15,000 grant.
Since then, Snyder has helped more than 60,000 foster children and raised more than $2 million in duffel bags and stuffed animals. She has spoken about her project at schools with former president Bill Clinton and appeared on talk shows, like Oprah and another hosted by Rosie O’Donnell. Snyder is also featured in three Chicken Soup for the Soul books and mentioned in The Humanitarian Leader in Each of Us, a book released in August 2011.
“Now I look back and I’m like, ‘Did I really do all that?’” Snyder says.
Freddie Mac had to withdraw its funding for Children to Children due to financial constraints, so Snyder has been unable to do much with the organization lately. She still receives occasional donations, though.
For now, Snyder is concentrating on getting her degree so she can help more foster children. And she’ll keep twirling at UNC-CH until she graduates. Performing, she says, takes her to her own world.
“Any time I pick up the baton, it’s a different me.”
