Marching+Band

[|marching band website] [|photo's & videos from 2008 season] Marching Band is in my opinion not only a sport but an art. The work we learn in the color guard is based on what the setting of the show will be, last year the show was An Enchanted Evening so the color guard was set on learning work to represent the sunset, night and the sunrise. The band starts working on learning their music at the begining of May once the directors have chosen the show songs and the title of the show, in April the start warming up on instruments so the can keep working and not forget the important things, and some even get placed on new instruments and have to learn how to play them. The color guard begins in May as well and until June we are in the gym learning work and memorizing every count. In June we hold mini camps so we can put the show together a little bit. In July we hold band camp for 2 weeks and 3 days the first week is from 8 am to 1 pm we eat lunch there from 11-11:30 and then get back to work the second week we work from 1 pm to 9 pm we bring a dinner for ourselves and they might provide it for us i dont know yet and neither do they. so during band camp we put together the entire show and learn the rest of the work. Once band camp is over we practice every Tuseday and Thursday and sometimes Saturdays on competition days. This year we will only have 4 competitions because we have moved up to a more professional stage. In example we WILL be performing at Hershey Stadium and just because we are moving into a more professional stage doesn't mean that our attitude will grow up, we are truly kids at heart and because of that we will be going to chocolate world before we compete! Last year we competed in TOB (tornament of the bands) now we will be performing in USSBA (i dont yet know what that means), last year the marching band came in 7th out of 43 groups top 10!!!!!!!

In all honesty I think that the color guard and marching band are under appreciated, because they put fourth so much effort and get about no attention from anyone in the school except for the football games but they are there to help support the football game and perform at half time and thats it. Many people think that marching band is easy, I would LOVE to see them try to play the songs on instruments while running across the field and/or toss a a flag perfectly and then land the catch and perform memorized work while dancing a running across the football field for over 4 minutes nonstop. I also believe that many teachers and faculty think it is unimportant because my entire time in high school i have only heard of 1 announcement for the indoor guard and no matter how kind people thought it was i found it very rude because they work just as hard as any sports team does but the get so much less credit for it then anyone else. I am not just saying this because i am in the color guard and marching band but because people have actually come up to me and told me that (guys and girls) some of them i am not even friends with! One of my worst experiances in outdoor guard was when one of our instructors, Cris, who is in charge of the rifles, was making us do triples and when ever someone dropped we added 10 push-ups on and in the end we had well over 200 push-ups to do and about 40 in we had to go back to working on the work with the rest of the group but he said he would get us at the end of practice but lucky for us he forgot.....that day we all loved Kathy for taking us away from him.

To most people color guard is boring, uninteresting, and a useless hobby, but to everyone who has lived this and has lived what we have,I mean who else besides the color guard and marching band can say they survived band camp? To those who have tried color guard and band, most will say they would do it again in a heart beat.