Shannon Johnston grew up in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and is currently attending Pikes Peak Community College. She is currently planning on majoring in economics or accounting, but she is also thinking about applying to veterinary school. Her passions are music, animals, and writing. In “This One Time at Band Camp,” Shannon discusses all the hard (and sometimes unacknowledged) work it takes to be a member of a nationally-recognized marching band.
In high school, it’s typical for the jocks to be put on a golden pedestal. Regardless of how many games they win or how many points are scored, they are the face of the school, and students never fail to cheer them on. Meanwhile, the band kids (especially the marching band kids) are at the bottom of the totem pole.
So naturally, when my parents forced me to join marching band my freshman year, I was reluctant to say the least. My school was just like the others. Many idolized the jocks and picked on the band kids even though the football team hadn’t won a single game the previous three years (and never while I was in school) while the marching band placed first or second in the state consistently. Our band even went to nationals more than a few times. Going into marching band, I thought the same as the rest of the students, only having the movie American Pie: Band Camp as a reference of what to expect.
My first day of camp was nothing too special. I picked up my baritone, received my dot book and number (where every movement is marked so an individual can know where to go next), scanned my music, and met my section leader and section mates for the first time. I was pleased to find that the kids I was playing with were just regular students who had the same passion for music that I had. We all talked and laughed and practiced our music together, nothing too intensive. I left camp my first day rather pleased, feeling like I was going to make some great life-long friends and get an easy extracurricular to put on college applications.
I went to camp the next day feeling confident in what lay ahead of me. I brought a small water bottle, a sandwich for lunch, and my instrument, feeling I had my bases covered.
After a few minutes of talking to my band mates, we were greeted with the sound of a blaring whistle. Before us stood a rather buff, serious-looking individual. He commanded us to get in line by section and proceeded to introduce himself. He went on a bit about his history as a marine boot camp instructor, and I couldn’t help but feel like I was in the wrong place. Why was a drill sergeant at our band camp? Over the deafening silence, he proceeded to set us in a block, all of us evenly spaced out around the track, and told us to start running in time.
The drum major took out his wood block and started to beat like a metronome at 60 beats per minute. We started to run, and we went around the track again and again and again, showing no sign of stopping until we made our sixth lap. As someone who was (at the time) extremely out of shape, I couldn’t help but lie on the ground completely out of breath, shocked by the length he made us run.
Surely that was going to be the worst of it…right? Wrong. We then proceeded to do push-ups, sit ups, arm circles, planks, side planks, yoga strength poses, squats, lunges, jumping jacks, and on and on it went, taking only thirty-second breaks every fifteen minutes. At the time I thought it would never end. We were two hours in before we finally got a real break. My band director told us we had ten minutes to rest before practice would begin. I was completely awestruck. After an intensive work out, practice hadn’t even begun yet.
After our break we learned how to stand at set (arms out so your instrument wouldn’t touch your body when down, and the bell of the horn up at a forty five degree angle when playing, elbows at a 45 degree angle, back straight, shoulders back, and weight forward just enough to fit a credit card under your heels and heels together with toes at a forty five degree angle), how to march forward (legs straight, planting down on your heel and rolling through), backward (legs straight, up on the balls of your feet and heels off the ground), and sideways (shoulders straight to the front and lower body turned to the side, again straight legged and rolling through the step). We also learned how to read our dot book on the football field and a few of our visuals (dancing) that would come into play during the show. As we went through all the information, I was flabbergasted. I wasn’t sure I was going to remember all of this, let alone do it all while playing three songs by memory.
After going through all of the fundamentals of marching and a much-needed lunch break, we finally spent the last two hours of our ten-hour day standing in an arch and playing the music which I found easy enough, but by the end of the day I was completely exhausted.
The first four days of camp were the same, going through all the exercises, workouts, and music at the end. It started to get a bit easier as I worked through the soreness of every muscle in my body as well as the mental exhaustion. Just when I thought I was catching on, we added our instruments to the mix (for the record, my baritone weighed twenty pounds). All over again the pain settled back into my bones and the mental stress of it all started to get to me. What happened to the easy flow I saw in that movie that one time? I again didn’t know if I was going to be able to do this, and self-doubt overtook me the following days.
After the first two weeks of camp, we finally did our first run-through of the show with music, visuals, and all. We wore our uniforms along with a plume twelve inches tall which always made a large sway when we weren’t marching correctly, as if announcing to the world who was the weakest link. We went forward, back, side to side, hold, visual, and back at it again, the rhythm of the music and the tip of the drum major’s baton leading the flow of it all.
At the end when we pulled our instruments from our faces and down to our sides, there was a rush of adrenaline, the sense of accomplishment and comradery among the 120 members filling the field before we marched off in time with one another. In that moment I knew I was completely enamored with marching band. It was the most physically and mentally demanding thing I had ever done, and I couldn’t help feeling proud of myself and of my band mates.
After the four weeks of ten-hour days of band camp were over and the school year began, it only became more intense. We had four-hour practices every day after school and competitions every Saturday for the next three months. Most days would go from four in the morning until midnight on a good day. We got to travel the state, and some years even the country, showing off our show to hundreds or even thousands in the stands. We sprinted across the field, changed directions, danced around and managed to keep it all uniform while playing with just as much passion and control as if we were sitting in our chairs and playing.
The rush of performing and pushing through the exhaustion halfway through a show never subsided, but I would not have had it any other way. While everyone else felt we were just a bunch of band geeks prancing around a field, I knew the hard work, effort, and sleepless nights we had all put in.
Together we knew that just because the jocks were the ones who were viewed as graceful and strong, we could have run circles around them all while maintaining the air control wind instruments require.
