At Large

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You don’t know squat about high school marching bands


Under the oppressive late-morning heat Tuesday, on a large asphalt slab on Churchill High School’s back forty, a ragtag group of students stood at attention.

In straight lines. Dripping sweat. Breathing heavily. With their hands gripped around imaginary saxophones, tubas and coronets.

From atop a construction riser, Tony Ruiz pulled a bullhorn to his mouth to address the 250 or so students in front of him.

“Alright. Four fours. Straight through.” At the rear of the group, senior Seth Woody fired up an electronic metronome, which was attached to its own bullhorn. On the beeps, the students moved in unison — well, almost in unison — stepping side to side, then back, and then forward to their starting place. They did it three more times, with the beeping metronome helping them keep time.

“Reset,” Ruiz said. “Let’s do it again.”

Welcome to band camp.

Like football, without the hitting. And harder, too.

Lost in the glare of Friday night lights are the efforts of the high school band.

The band is shortchanged. Football gets headlines. The band gets to play before a crowd that’s getting up to buy Cokes, go to the toilet, or both.

At large schools, the band can be three times the size of the varsity football team. It starts practice two weeks before the football team can. It practices for 8 hours a day, which is longer than any football team works out. The state’s football play-offs are over in December, but with marching and performance contests held year-round, the band season never ends.

And on Friday nights, the football team gets 48 minutes to win. The band gets 10 minutes to win you over.

While the football teams gets the headlines during the week and the undivided attention of the stadium for most of the evening, the band has its own brutal regimen of practice and perfection. And they get 10 minutes — including the time it takes to march onto the field and off — to do their show.

Football parents watch the game. But for each game, there are 60 band parents riding herd over the group, their props and the bigger pieces of equipment. They work like dogs.

The football team runs plays on the field and has to get 11 guys doing the right thing for a few seconds at a time. The band runs plays that take 5 minutes, must coordinate the movements of 300 kids, and has to do it all while playing “Rock and Roll Pt. 2.”

Big Daddy Kane tells us that “Pimpin’ ain’t easy.” Well, neither is marching band.

The closer

“They don’t do it for publicity or because it’s easy,” says Albert Lo, director of bands. “They do it because they enjoy it. That’s the key to our success.”

Churchill is one of the state’s premier band programs. It’s a regular fixture in the state finals, and came in 3rd among 750 competing schools last year. It routinely places a half-dozen or more musicians on the state’s all-star band.

Much of the credit goes to Lo, the school’s second band director in the last 21 years. During band camp Tuesday, he was mainly a spectator, letting Ruiz and other music faculty members run the show.

Lo, then, is like a closer in baseball. “I let the others do a lot of the teaching,” he said. “When we get closer to performance, that’s when I take over. It’s more effective this way.” If they hear the same voice over and over, they tend to tune them out. This way, I can get their attention.”

Band of brothers … and sisters

Lo knows most of the kids on a first-name basis. He didn’t display much of that Tuesday. Instead, Ruiz and Alan Sharps, the associate band director, ran practice. Sam Woodfield, another band director, patrolled the nether regions of the formation. Drum Majors Scott Duncan and Stephanie Hestilow patrolled the front of the formation.

Ruiz schooled them on footwork. The practice lot is painted with blue lines to simulate football stripes, and there are white dots. Ruiz wanted precision, with students straddling the white dots during mid-movement and standing on it at other times.

Sharps had words for the alternates, typically underclassmen vying for a place on the 300-member band. They watched the upperclassmen and Sharps told them to pay close attention so that, when called upon, they could step in and not slow down the group.

“If you don’t,” he said, “maybe you’re not mature enough to be in the Churchill varsity band.”

And that’s a big deal. A football team can turn a busted play into a touchdown. But if one person screws up during a band performance, there is no salvaging the event. A carefully choreographed and rehearsed show turns into a recreation of pedestrian traffic in downtown Tokyo when Godzilla arrives — lots of screaming people running in all directions, all of them on the verge of being destroyed when it’s all over.

While working in an environment unlike that of the football team, Lo says the band has the same goal — teaching kids about teamwork, the value of hard work, how to cope with failure and how to handle success.


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