It’s after sunset. While plenty of other students loaf or party, 20-year-old Ashley Morris is in a gym at Old Dominion University.
She’s juggling three batons – a talent that, while impressive, might not seem particularly profound until you look deeper, past her pageant-perfect smile and the blur of silver rods spinning high over her head.
Ashley has no coach to push her. No teammates to pull her along. At football and basketball games, she can feed off the roaring crowd. But on practice nights like these, she's alone, the silence broken only by the soft “thwack” of caught batons smacking her palms.