They’re at football games, parades, inaugurations, award ceremonies, scholarship signings, etc. You can hear them marching in from half a mile away. They are the backbone of school functions, they’re the heartbeat of sports. A marching band can be the most energetic icon of any school.

It’s not just about appearances. People walk into their schools not knowing what to do with themselves, but the moment they step into the band room, they figure it out. It’s a place where four hundred people can share the same sense of humor. All of the kids could be arguing about the exact same thing at one time, but if one of them ever had a problem, the entire band would be there to back them up. The drum major is the most authoritative best friend someone could have. Music gets hidden if you leave it laying out. Toys get tossed up onto speakers and left there for three years. It’s a place where you can call the teachers by their first names, and pretend they don’t know you’re doing it. You could never call it a club, it’s so much more than that. It’s a family that can be as big as eight hundred people, and those are just the ones who play instruments! There’s countless parents and supporters who come in just because they realize how incredibly important a program like this is. It’s not a club; it’s not a group; it’s more than a team. A simple noun could never be enough to explain what band really is.
Band has never been so prominent in today’s society, and that’s so amazing because it’s such an exceptional tool used to bring children and teenagers together. It literally teaches them an entire new language. Reading music, memorizing it to the point where playing music while marching isn’t hard at all. These skills that we learn in marching band are ones that could impact our lives forever. We will always remember that time the band director gave the drum line twenty eight laps. We will always remember when the band got straight superiors in the marching competition. We will always remember when the band director snuck us over to a Starbucks because we were cold. These aren’t experiences that you can forget.