After Chloe Holladay and Kulyn Hubbard exchanged their vows at a mountaintop ceremony in Chattanooga, Tennessee, earlier this year, the bride ditched her thirteen-foot train and heels for a bubble skirt, boots, and baton. When she returned to the dance floor, accompanied by a troupe of majorettes and a drumline, no one was surprised—whether it’s for interceptions or wedding receptions, that’s just how the Alabama Crimsonettes celebrate.
“I’ve been to so many different Crimsonette weddings before mine, and it’s just a huge tradition,” Holladay says. “It really was never a question for me.”
Holladay’s time as a University of Alabama Crimsonette—the esteemed baton-twirling arm of the school’s Million Dollar Band—ended when she graduated in 2024. But since then, every time the first notes of the fight song, “Yea Alabama,” have played at a wedding, her muscle memory has taken over. It’s a tradition for the twirlers in attendance to break into their time-honored, on-field choreography, using the occasion to celebrate the sisterhood that supported them through their college years.
“It gets electric, and everyone starts clapping,” Holladay says. “For the people watching, they get to see something that is so special to us because we are such a close knit team, even after we graduated.”
The wedding day performance was, of course, about celebrating another bond, too. Holladay and Hubbard met during her freshman year in Tuscaloosa, and while Holladay practiced honing minute movements to match the twenty-nine other girls on the team, Hubbard quickly fell into his own rhythm with the Crimsonettes.
“He did not miss one single Alabama game that I performed at,” Holladay says. “He was known actually as the ‘bag carrier’ because he would carry my bag to the stadium. That Crimsonette journey wasn’t just mine, it was his too, because he was such a big supporter throughout all the craziness. It was very important for our story to showcase that.”
For Holladay—who is now the first-ever majorette for the Tennessee Titans (and the first majorette to twirl for any NFL team in over two decades)—the performance was more than an homage to her college days. “I started twirling when I was in kindergarten,” she says. “I always dreamed of being an Alabama Crimsonette because of the sparkles, and just everything [the team] stood for. They were so classy, so beautiful. They were so clean and good on the field. As a little kid, you look up to those girls.They’re like idols to you.”
With surprise appearances by Alabama mascot Big Al and the Titans’ T-Rac, a fireworks show over the mountains, and a send-off in a hot-air balloon, it’s hard for Holladay to crown a most memorable moment from the wedding, but the performance is one that will stick with her in more ways than one. “People think because we are so perfectly in sync together that we’ve practiced it beforehand, but it’s just the training that goes into being a Crimsonette,” Holladay says. “Even down to the finger, we are all clean. It’s just forever ingrained. I could do this routine in my sleep. I’ll be eighty years old, and I can do it.”
See Holladay’s wedding day performance below.
Helen Bradshaw, Garden & Gun’s social media editor, is a born-and-raised Floridian. As such, she has an aptitude for finding alligators and an affinity for the weird and wonderful stories of the South. She graduated from Northwestern University with a focus in environmental journalism.