olly Fleming coaches Kassie Matthews at her studio in Crawford. Fleming has coached twirling since her freshman year at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College. (Photo/Olivia Shapiro)
Lifelong Love: Fleming brings out best in twirlers
Olivia Shapiro
Remember your counts.
Legs and arms straight.
Toes pointed.
These are techniques engraved into the minds of twirlers who have learned under twirling coach Polly Fleming.
The competition and performances, though, are only a small part of the twirling experience. In the program that Fleming has created, the girls learn not only technique, but comradery and grace.
"She has touched many lives along the way," said Paula Resop, one of Fleming's first students in Oglethorpe County. Resop, now Fleming’s assistant, and her daughter was also coached by Fleming.
This generational commitment to the baton comes from Fleming’s long-held personal passion.
“I really almost have an unhealthy love for twirling,” Fleming said. “It continued to be part of a lifelong career, not just through high school and college.”
Fleming, a Tifton, Georgia, native, began twirling when she was in the first grade.
“My first baton was a broomstick my grandad cut for me,” Fleming said.
She twirled at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, while obtaining her degree. She began coaching while she was a freshman.
“I realized there was really no classes for twirlers in Tifton at all – there was no social media then, so I just walked around the neighborhood and I knew a lot of the younger girls, and I said I’m going to try a twirling group,” she said.
They began practicing to band recordings played on an old tape recorder on the flat concrete driveway of her parents’ home.
She moved to Oglethorpe County with her now-husband to pursue a degree in early childhood education at the University of Georgia. Fleming said her husband’s family inspired her to become an educator.
Fleming began teaching first grade at Oglethorpe County Primary School in 1978 and began teaching twirling after school in the OCPS gym.
She recently retired from teaching and embraced coaching full time, teaching groups of students including her Starlet Twirlers, her competition girls, the high school band majorettes and college students – especially working with the UGA majorettes.
Many of Fleming’s students have gone on to twirl on majorette lines in college. She has three students – Emily Grahm, Addie Dellinger and Carrie Tweedell – on the UGA line.
“It’s kind of amazing to watch them, you know, change from just a little, once-a-week lesson into, you know, someone that can actually perform and the crowd is excited about it,” Fleming added.
Sheila Sims, Fleming’s other assistant coach, was once her student, too, and she has a college-aged daughter who also grew up twirling under Fleming’s instruction.
Sims began twirling in the first grade and attended nationals under Fleming.
“Ms. Polly would offer to take me,” Sims said. “So I would ride with her and her daughter, Katy, a lot of times to competitions, and that is one of my good memories.”
Fleming said she finds inspiration to continue coaching through the satisfaction and excitement on her students’ faces.
“It’s the look in their eyes, you know, when they get out and fight to perform in front of a group or in a parade, when they’re marching and they finally realize, oh, we are the parade,” Fleming said. “People are looking at us. You know, we’re the entertainment.”