Disease interrupts marching season yet again
COLUMN
Coming in on Tuesday, Nov. 1 for practice, everything felt weird. There were over 30 people absent. Our drumline was down a couple of players, and I knew a lot of people were starting to get sick. We had been highly encouraged to mask up the week leading up to area.
That day at after-school rehearsal, we were told that we were just going to do a stand-still rep of our performance since so many people were out, and that we would dismiss early, which is when it hit me that the flu was seriously affecting the band. As the drumline was warming up, I whispered over to my drumline captain, “This reminds me of covid year.” That day, we had two out of five basses and three out of four snares; the band was smaller than normal. She laughed at me and looked shocked. That was when Mr. Mills, our head band director, told us that depending on Friday’s attendance, we would have to cancel Saturday’s competition. By Thursday we had all but one bass drum back for our game along with 35 other people absent from other sections. That day in class, we found out that Mr. Mills had pulled us from the contest in advance.
I felt disappointed, but I was already mentally prepared that the band wasn’t going to be back in time. There wouldn’t be enough people to move props or have any of the formations make sense, so I understood his decision was right. I’m sad that my last rep wasn’t the closure I wanted after four years of band. I was also sad because our last competition was supposed to be an Austin competition, and it was gonna be a true band competition of going on a long bus ride to Austin and coming home late and being in Buc-ee’s at midnight with other bands. We also were going to go against bands that we had gone against at the beginning of the year at our drumline contest that we beat, so it had been exciting to think about playing against them and beating them for drumline titles again. Our drumline was really good this year, and I wish we could’ve gone on to prove ourselves one more time.
I spent that Saturday, November 8, which would have been the US Bands Austin competition, with my family and friends instead of competing. I ached for a satisfying final performance, but instead I was reminded of my true final performance at Area on Oct. 29. It was a great prelims run
through, which is the performance you do in order to qualify for finals, except for the fact that I dropped my stick and then lost my scoop, which helps direct sound from the bottom of the drum towards the audience. This freaked me out, but by the drum break, I hyped out and wasn’t stressed anymore. That was a good feeling. For the first time in eight years the band qualified for Area finals. It was really nice to feel the reward for all our hard work as we headed to our finals performance. Later on at the finals rep, I didn’t perform my best because I felt sick and uncomfortable (no, I didn’t have the flu). I just prayed to God to not let me throw up, and I didn’t! So praise Jesus, for real. On top of that, I felt like my opening roll was so bad, and not nearly as good as it could have been. Once I got into it, I played as best I could while still feeling nauseous and gross. In the end, I was proud of the band as a whole, and personally, I felt accomplished because I persevered through it.