Tuesday, October 09, 2012

Hosting a Marching Band Competition

Having been in marching band and now having a kid in marching means I have been around a lot of marching band competitions.  What I have never done is participate in hosting a marching band competition.  Until now.

There is a lot to keep track of and many months of planning to prepare for this event.  You have to know where each band needs to be at each minute, who's going to guide them around the facility, who the judges are going to be, what food will be sold, how much food you will need, where are you going to park multiple buses for each band, choosing and purchasing trophies, creating programs, selling ads, and even guiding your spectators in parking.  Those are just a few of the surface things you need to consider before you start trying to host your own event.  Thankfully the majority of the planning was handled by the band booster organization and when I showed up I just had to be assigned a job.

I got parking lot duty and was given a team of three students.  And a 5 year old.

Parking lot duty was a slow and boring job for the early part of the afternoon.  I kicked a few ant hills and threw some rocks to occupy the time.  Things got pretty exciting when the mayor showed up, but after we directed him for parking it was back to kicking ant hills.  The parents that were running the competition were all riding around in 4-wheelers keeping things running.  On one stop at my station they dropped off some additional parents to help me with parking.

I didn't think I needed any help to guide the one car every five minutes into an empty parking lot, but I appreciated having the company.  I showed the other dad my handy work on the ant hills and he was pretty impressed.

Near the end of the day, once all the bands had arrived and were headed to the field I was dismissed and made my way to the stadium to enjoy the last part of the show.

It took a lot of people to make this competition come together and in the end it went very well.

Here is a video of the host band - The Liberty Red Devil Regiment Band  *It's a little shaky on my cell phone and I was seated between two kids under 5, but you can still enjoy the show.


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