A SPARKLING SENIOR

The first male captain of the Sunset Bisonettes has taken his final bow

Story by EMMA RUBY

Stepping under the Friday Night Lights is a rite of passage for high school-aged boys across Texas. But when Diego Aguilar looks back at his years on the football field, he won’t think of touchdown passes or shoulder pads.

Instead, he will remember the sparkly purple, silver and white of the Sunset Bisonette uniforms, the rustle of foil poms and the crowd’s roar as the squad hit uniform high kicks and slid into splits.

Aguilar graduated from Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in May after spending his senior year clad in white and silver — the colors reserved for the captain of the Bisonettes.

He is the first male in program history to hold the title.

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Aguilar began dancing in seventh grade, after a school counselor accidentally assigned him to a dance class elective.

He was a shy, quiet kid, but dance came naturally to him.

“It allowed me to express myself in a way I couldn’t do while speaking. I was really good at it, and I was happy to be good at something that wasn’t just academic,” Aguilar says.

He met Leah Huggins, the director of the Bisonettes, later that school year when she taught a master class for the young dancers.

She says that from the beginning, Aguilar carried himself like a dancer.

“I noticed his professionalism, his ability to learn new material quickly, and his love for dance was obvious even though he was brand new,” Huggins says. “When he danced, you couldn’t tell he was a shy person.”

When it came time for high school, Aguilar was torn between Booker T. Washington’s dance program — which he says he never expected to be accepted into — and Sunset High School, where he could dance drill team under Huggins.

Aguilar decided to attend Booker T. but was told by Huggins that if he could balance both, he would be allowed to join the Bisonettes.

Aguilar knew he wanted to be captain as soon as he joined the team as a freshman, despite the fact that a boy had never had the honor before. Up until 10 years ago, it was rare to see a boy on a drill team squad at all, he says.

“It was nerve-wracking to break that stereotype that girls do drill team and boys do football,” Aguilar says. “I wanted to break that barrier to inspire other male dancers that they can be captain, they can be in drill team.”

Aguilar was named team lieutenant his second year.

It was the first time he broke a barrier for the team, becoming the first sophomore to be given a leadership position under Huggins’ tenure.

Aguilar continued to be a team leader his junior year, but Huggins says during those first two years,

Aguilar had to learn how to break out of his shell and become a leader.

“He’s not the screaming-in-yourface, loud, yelling type. Everyone has a different way that they lead, and he’s a little quiet, but I know the girls respect him, and he doesn’t have to yell because they are already listening to him,” Huggins says.

And as a senior, Aguilar led the long line of Bisonettes onto the football field every Friday at halftime like a shimmering silver and white mother duck.

Aguilar isn’t done with dance even though his drill team career has concluded.

In the fall, he will attend the University of Oklahoma and study modern dance performance. He says he wants to be a professional dancer before eventually becoming a drill team director himself.

The close of his senior year has been bittersweet and hectic, he says.

“I felt like I was everywhere at once,” he says of his first semester, where he juggled college applications, football games, the start of competition season and his senior showcase for Booker T.

Aguilar says “every moment” of the last four years has been important to him, but his favorite memory from his time as a Bisonette is the “surreal” night he became captain.

A beloved team tradition, the dancers for the upcoming year’s team circle around the candidates for the leadership positions. The outgoing lieutenants and captain hand off their batons to the new appointees, signaling the changing of the guard.

Aguilar says on the night he became captain, he stood in the middle of the circle with his eyes squeezed shut.

His pounding heartbeat thundered in his ears, he says, drowning out the team drumroll.

“All I could hear was screaming. I didn’t want to look. But when I did, I saw white and silver,” Aguilar says. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, I actually made it. I accomplished the goal I set for myself when I was 13.’”