Marching Band

What 's the Football Team doing on the Marching Field? “Ting, tong, tong, tong, ting, tong, tong, tong,” the doctor beat echos through the bitter cold October air in the early hours of a Saturday morning. It’s marching season. Band kids across northern Indiana are hard at work perfecting their show for competition that has yet to come in the afternoon. The past three months have been used to learn and fine tune their show to it 's best. Long hours of hard work, sweat, tears, dedication, time, love, and much more is put into a band program and what comes out of it is a strong group of individuals who have the ability to do great things in life. Lessons that you learn during the course of your marching band career will stay with you for the

Whether it 's the football team working on their plays or the academic team working on how fast they can find the right answer to their question, we all need to spend some time perfecting what we do. Although, there is something different about the marching band. If you pay close attention during the afterschool hours you will notice that the football team starts to pack up and leave while the marching band is still hard at work out on the pavement. The marching band 's average practice duration varies from 2 1/2 to 3 hours. In the summer we have a 2 1/2 week long band camp that last 8 hours each day. This calculates up to around 300 hours of practice (not including sectional time and performances). All that hard work pays off when you get that one chance to go to state finals with some other great bands as well. Many things in life require a lot practice. From raising a child to having a job interview, marching band can build the skills you need to apply to

Life lesson #3 Be accepting to change... It will happen Some people have a tough time dealing with change. I know I do. This last summer, during our parade season, our former band director, Helen Hockemeyer, informed us that she was leaving the program due to some changes that the school system planned on making. As we sat in the grass and listened to this news, a deep pit, the feeling you get when you find out someone close has passed, formed inside of my stomach. Everything became blurry and I could only hear the mumbles of Hockemeyer 's voice. Everyone surrounding me seemed to be experiencing the same thing. No one ever saw it coming. After practice, I went up to ask Mrs. Hockemeyer a question about a fundraiser we were doing. I tried to hold the sorrow in but it was too heavy for me to carry. The second she wrapped her arms around my body I lost it. I cried into her shoulder. My lungs emptied but I couldn 't fill them back up. She held me in her arms for about 2 minutes. "You have to keep going or else I won 't have any reason to come back," Mrs. Hockemeyer encouraged as I transitioned my head upon her shoulder. Right then I had a purpose, and that was to not disappoint the most influential person