A quick internet search as a high schooler in Cullman set Nevaeh Green on the path to the University of South Alabama — and now to Team USA. Green typed in a simple query: colleges in Alabama with feature twirlers. Unlike the synchronized majorette lines found in most college marching bands across the state, feature twirling calls for individualized choreography, difficult transitions and tricks that can stack up to five batons at once. It is Green’s specialty and her passion, and South was the most prominent of the handful of Alabama schools that offered it.
By the time she graduated from Cullman High School, Green had accepted a $7,500 renewable twirling scholarship from South — the largest such award in the state — and headed to Mobile. Now a rising sophomore majoring in elementary education in the College of Education and Professional Studies, Green has already put the university on the national twirling map.
A Breakthrough Summer at Nationals
At this summer’s National Baton Twirling Association Championships at the University of Notre Dame, she won the show twirl title, placed in the top five nationally in multiple events, and earned one of a limited number of spots on Team USA. The team will represent the United States at the Inspiration Cup World Baton Twirling Championships in Italy in March 2027.
The NBTA championships draw the top twirlers in the country to the South Bend, Indiana, campus each summer, with competition spread across solo, strutting, pairs and show categories. Notre Dame’s stadium and athletic facilities give the event a collegiate stage, and for many competitors the trip to South Bend is the culmination of a full year of preparation. Green had competed at the national championships twice before, but always as an individual competitor. This year she wore her South uniform and performed to a recording of the Jaguar Marching Band.
“My main goal was to represent South on the national level,” Green said. Her winning show twirl routine — a no-drop performance set to “River Deep-Mountain High” — is the event’s showcase category, built around personality and multiple-baton illusions she once doubted she could pull off.
“I just wanted to go out there and have fun with it,” she said. “Hearing the crowd cheer after you catch a trick, seeing them have fun with you, was really encouraging.”
When officials called her name for the Team USA roster, the moment caught her off guard. “I didn’t really expect it, and I wasn’t prepared to hear my name,” she said. “It was almost just a breath of relief. It felt like all the hard work had finally paid off.”
Feature Twirling Finds a Home at South
Green’s route to Mobile began with research rather than recruitment. Most college bands across Alabama carry majorette lines in the traditional style, with squads performing synchronized routines in formation. Feature twirlers operate differently: they take the field alone or in small featured groups, performing choreography built around high-difficulty tosses, body work and transitions that showcase an individual performer. The demand for the role is growing in the Southeast, but only a handful of in-state programs field featured twirlers, which is why her search query landed so squarely on South Alabama.
The university’s feature twirler performs with the Jaguar Marching Band at football games and band showcases throughout the fall, giving the program a signature element on game days at Hancock Whitney Stadium. For Green, the role also carried financial substance: her $7,500 renewable award is the largest twirling scholarship offered by any college in Alabama, an incentive that helped make the decision to leave Cullman an easy one.
A Decade of Practice in the Backyard
Green started twirling at age 9, when her mother enrolled her in classes at a studio in Cullman. A decade of practice followed, much of it in the family’s backyard, where baton after baton was tossed, spun and caught against the north Alabama sky. Preparing for this year’s nationals meant four hours of practice daily plus strength training over the summer.
“I had to start disciplining myself to practice just the weekdays, and on the weekends I would give myself a break,” she said.
The discipline shows in her results. Five-baton work — stacking five spinning batons in a single routine — sits at the edge of what the sport demands, requiring timing, grip changes and recovery sequences that leave almost no margin for error. A no-drop show twirl performance at the national level, set to music and built around crowd-pleasing illusions, is the kind of routine twirlers spend years building toward.
Training at the Moulton Band Complex
Green trained at South’s new Geri and Gordon Moulton Jaguar Marching Band Complex under Michaela Rader, the program’s feature twirler coach, before leaving for Notre Dame. The Moulton complex gives the Jaguar Marching Band a dedicated home for rehearsal, storage and instruction, and its practice facilities allow twirlers and musicians to work side by side in the weeks leading up to football season.
Rader’s coaching role places her among a small group of collegiate feature twirler instructors in the state, and the one-on-one nature of feature twirling instruction means the coach and performer refine routines together, drill by drill, in a way that differs from ensemble band work. The preparation paid off in Indiana, where Green’s South-branded performance stood out among hundreds of individual competitors.
Balancing Books, Band and Team USA
This fall, Green returns to South to balance classes and marching season with fellow feature twirlers Sydnee Cantley and Lily Hatchett. She plans to use Mondays — the band’s one day off from rehearsal — to prepare for the world stage in Italy.
The schedule ahead is demanding even by the standards of a student-athlete. As an elementary education major, Green will move through coursework in the College of Education and Professional Studies while committing afternoons and evenings to band rehearsal, plus game-day performances throughout the football season. Add world championship preparation to that mix and the Monday practice windows become precious.
Competing for Team USA at the Inspiration Cup will place her against twirlers from around the world in March 2027, when the United States squad travels to Italy for the international championships. International competition follows rules and judging formats similar to the national circuit, but the field is deeper and the routines faster, and American performers have historically been measured against strong contingents from Europe and Asia.
What the Sport Means in Alabama
Baton twirling occupies a distinctive place in Alabama’s marching band culture. High school majorette lines are a fixture at Friday night games across the state, and the pipeline from studio classes to school lines to collegiate feature spots has produced national-caliber performers for generations. Studios in towns like Cullman serve as the entry point, teaching youngsters the fundamentals of tosses, wrist work and body coordination before the tricks grow taller and faster.
Collegiate feature twirling, meanwhile, has become a visible point of pride for university bands. A featured twirler under the stadium lights is often the performer the crowd watches most closely, and a successful routine can energize an entire halftime show. Programs that invest in feature twirlers — with scholarships, dedicated coaching and rehearsal time — gain a recruiting edge in a sport where the very best performers have options across the Southeast.
South’s investment has now paid a national dividend. Green’s show twirl title and Team USA selection put a South Alabama uniform on the podium at Notre Dame, and her story began with nothing more than a search bar and a question about which Alabama colleges could take her twirling seriously.
Her answer, this fall, will be visible on the field in Mobile every time the Jaguar Marching Band takes the halftime stage — and, next March, in Italy, wearing the colors of Team USA.
A Rising Sophomore With Room to Grow
Green’s national breakthrough arrived in only her second summer of college eligibility, which suggests the ceiling for her collegiate career remains well above where it currently sits. Feature twirlers typically hit their competitive prime in their late teens and early twenties, meaning the strongest seasons of her career could still be ahead of her at South. Each additional year of work with Rader at the Moulton complex adds refinement to the five-baton routines and body work that defined her title-winning performance in Indiana.
Her choice of major also points toward a future shaped by the same patience and repetition that baton twirling demands. Elementary education students at South move through methods coursework and classroom placements across Mobile County schools before graduation, and twirlers-turned-teachers often describe their sport as an education in practice itself: breaking a difficult skill into pieces, drilling it until it becomes automatic and staying composed when the stakes are highest.
For now, the priorities are more immediate. Fall camp, band rehearsals and game-day preparation will fill her weeks in Mobile, with Cantley and Hatchett sharing the feature twirler duties and the spotlight. The Jaguar Marching Band’s season will run alongside South’s football schedule, giving Green a stage every Saturday to perform the craft she began practicing in a Cullman studio at age 9 and refined in her family’s backyard for a decade.
Then comes the opportunity she did not expect to receive so soon: a Team USA uniform, a trip to Italy and a chance to compete for a world championship wearing her country’s colors, with a university scholarship, a national title and a cheering section back in Baldwin’s neighboring Cullman County already behind her.
