0
0
After the three-year hiatus, the marching band is back. Those who have done marching band before are excited to do it again especially since they’re doing both games and competition.
The marching band has struggled with getting members. This was the main reason for not having it last year.
“This year we had enough in the department to make it happen,” said Tim Kidder, marching band instructor. “They all worked really hard to make the season possible.”
The biggest obstacle they had to overcome was getting people to join.
“There was a lot of the recruitment that I enjoyed doing. I made a couple promotion videos to get people interested. I also did video announcing the show later on in the year after summer band. We just talked to a bunch of people just to get them interested” senior Janessa Dyches said.
There are 23 students in the marching band. There aren’t any sousaphones or tubas so the bari sax has to make up for both. They also have a very small drum line and color guard.
“We didn’t get very many people out for color guard,” Kidder said. “I was expecting five or seven and we ended up with two.”
The three coaches are Ross Christiansen, Tim Kidder, and Ariel Brown. Brathan Nielsen is the drum major with Janessa Dyches as the assistant drum major.
“I get to conduct everybody, kinda like the head student,” Nielsen said. “It’s a lot different from before because I’m the drum major now. I’m not really playing an instrument.”
The music that they are playing for competition is called Egypt which is broken into three movements.
“I think there was a theme that me, Brathan, Kidder, and Ariel did discuss that we wanted to do so we just like before the school ended last year searched and looked around at different stuff. We came across Egypt which stuck up out to and fit the band more,” Dyches said.
They practice twice a week on Mondays and Thursdays after school. They also all had to participate in summer band. Not everyone who was in summer band is in marching band but most are band students.
Marching band is different from normal band and the students who are in marching band enjoy it.
“It brings us together in a way more than a regular band,” senior Libby Booher said.
