Story by Hannah Rosenberger
Visuals by Jane Durden
When Julia Arciola steps onto the field at Kenan Stadium, she is alone.
Not in the literal sense of the word — she’s usually surrounded by the 300-odd members of the Marching Tar Heels, not to mention the 50,000 screaming football fans that line the stadium on all sides.
But clad in a rhinestone-studded dress and clutching a trio of batons, she is the only baton twirler on the field — the first the university has had since the 2020 football season, and the most decorated feature twirler in recent memory to strut onto UNC-Chapel Hill’s turf at halftime.
Arciola started baton twirling at 5 and was the Florida state champion by the time she was 6. She’s a two-time national champion in the three-baton event and has represented Team USA at the World Baton Twirling Championships five times in her career, including this past summer in Liverpool, England, where she brought home a bronze medal.
But for most twirlers, it’s not the competitions or the titles that serve as the cherry on top of their baton career.
Instead, it’s the chance to be a college twirler. And in a state like North Carolina — and for a twirler like Arciola at UNC-Chapel Hill — it means the chance to use a small sport to make a big impact.
“It could be a dying sport, without people sharing it,” Arciola said. “Not that it is a dying sport — I actually think that it’s getting bigger right now. And I think that’s because a lot of the college twirlers — but also the non-college twirlers, the coaches, the high school students, even the middle school students — we all want twirling to not just stay where it is but grow into something much bigger.”
In North Carolina
North Carolina isn’t what most people would call a “baton twirling state.”
There’s exactly one competition baton club in the Triangle area — Flourish Baton Club, run by former North Carolina State University twirler Lauren Nogle. One other studio in eastern North Carolina, though Nogle said she hasn’t seen them at recent competitions. The entire state only hosts one or two twirling competitions each year.
When Melissa Pauletich’s daughter Palmer saw a baton twirler on an episode of the Disney Channel show “Bunk’d,” she declared to her mom that she had to learn how to twirl a baton. Palmer now twirls at Flourish with Nogle, but it wasn’t easy for Melissa to find somewhere in North Carolina where she would have the opportunity.
“I went down a rabbit hole of calling dance studios and places online that said they had baton,” Pauletich said. “I was laughed at.”
Bethany Schreiner, the feature twirling instructor at North Carolina State University, called it a “dry spell” — and she said it’s partially because university twirling programs in the state aren’t always consistent.
N.C. State and North Carolina A&T State University both have well-established collegiate twirling programs, but Wake Forest University hadn’t had a twirler in years until Kayley Mathe, a Forsyth Technical Community College student who twirls with the band as part of the school’s shared experience program. UNC-Charlotte didn’t have a marching band until 2015, much less a feature twirler.
It can be hard for younger students to be exposed to something so niche when it’s not at the schools immediately surrounding them — and when those young twirlers don’t have someone nearby to look up to.
UNC-Chapel Hill Band Director Jeff Fuchs said he wouldn’t let someone go out on the field with the Marching Tar Heels who wasn’t spectacular — and based on the response he’s had to Arciola’s performances with them this fall, he can see a future for a steady twirling program.
“People in the twirling world know her,” Fuchs said. “Since she’s been with us, even just this little bit, we’ve started to get a lot more interest in really good twirlers that compete.”
More Than Just Twirling
Chloe Drake tosses her baton in the air before whipping her leg in the air and ducking her head toward the ground in an illusion, popping back up in time for her baton to land neatly in her hand. She’s been working to perfect her double illusion — that same motion, but twice around before catching the baton — because it’s a required skill for most collegiate twirlers, in addition to the stage presence required to keep a stadium’s eyes on you as a solo performer on a hundred yard field.
Before Drake even started training competitively with Nogle at Flourish about five years ago, the high school junior knew she wanted to twirl in college. Drake and her parents drive all the way from Wadesboro, outside of Charlotte, for private lessons and Flourish team practices every other weekend — 96 miles, to be exact, said her dad, Shane.
She’ll be ready to twirl in college come fall 2025, unless she gets into Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, one of the top aviation schools in the country — and a university without a twirling program. For someone who’s wanted to be a pilot since she was 3, that dream comes first.
An emphasis on twirlers’ academic goals is one thing that separates college twirling from other university athletics. Schreiner said it’s a priority during the N.C. State audition process, especially the interview, that their chosen twirlers aren’t there only to twirl — they’re there for an education.
“Football season is only one semester,” Claudia Swauger, one of the N.C. State feature twirlers, said. “And you have a whole other semester where you’re not really doing anything — we occasionally have a couple performances, but for the most part — you’re not doing anything with twirling.”
When Arciola was accepted into a master’s program in the UNC-Chapel Hill department of Middle Eastern and Asian Studies last spring, her first thought was whether she would continue twirling in graduate school.
She had already twirled during her freshman year at Baylor University and for three years at the University of Illinois. And it’s uncommon for collegiate twirlers to continue after undergrad, both because those four years are perceived as the ultimate end goal in twirling and simply because of the demands of graduate programs.
But Arciola knew North Carolina was like Illinois in the sense that baton twirling didn’t have a substantial presence. Whenever Arciola steps out onto the field, there’s a real possibility that this performance will be someone’s first time seeing a baton twirler.
It’s important to her that she stretches the traditional bounds of collegiate twirling, especially at a school without a twirling history. That means performing everywhere from the roaring Dean E. Smith Center during a Duke-UNC men’s basketball game to UNC Hospitals community events.
“I’ve been given this position where I have the autonomy to do basically anything I want in terms of sharing the sport,” Arciola said. “And so I feel like it’s my duty to use all the outlets that I can and show everyone that twirling isn’t just something that you see on the field.”
The Next Generation
On a brisk February Sunday, Flourish Baton Club’s nine competitive twirlers gather at the tennis courts in Nogle’s Apex neighborhood. With Lizzo’s “Pink” from the “Barbie” movie blasting from Nogle’s iPhone, her youngest four twirlers practice exchanging their batons mid-routine with controlled underhand throws. The older girls are throwing back walkovers and double spins on the other court, trying to choreograph the ending three-baton portion of the routine they’ll perform at their first competition in a month.
Nogle bounces between the groups, watching her girls with a thoughtful eye and whipping a baton of her own with precision. Twirling was such a positive part of Nogle’s identity from a young age, she said, and it inspires her to bring that energy to the next generation of twirlers.
“I have a new student who just started in January who saw my twirlers at the Apex Christmas parade, and she told her mom that she wanted to be out there and twirl,” Nogle said. “And so now she’s joining our recreation class, and I feel like every time I hear that story, it just keeps me going.”
When collegiate twirlers stick around after college and begin coaching, Nogle said, it makes elite coaches more available and continues interest in the sport — beginning a cycle of support for baton.
Arciola started coaching through an elementary school program she started in her South Florida hometown back in high school. She now trains on Zoom with five or six twirlers, including a high schooler in Illinois who’s hoping to pursue collegiate twirling, and two others from the Triangle area twirl with Arciola in her Durham apartment complex’s parking garage.
She’ll probably hang up her baton competitively once she graduates from her master’s program, but eventually, she wants to judge twirling competitions. She said that’s the best way to leave a lasting impact on the sport — maybe even getting it to the Olympics someday.
But for now, she’s shooting for another championship this summer — and one last football season on the field in the fall.
“I realized that home didn’t have a particular place,” Arciola said, “It was actually just these 30-inch metal sticks.”
