Meara Isenberg
Staff Writer
@mearaannee
At approximately 9 p.m. on Tuesday, the 330 members of Coppell Band and 27 color guards walked off a bus in San Antonio and into the pouring rain. The mass of rain-coated high school students headed towards the Alamodome, where their final performance would take place.
Coppell Band placed eighth at the UIL State Marching Band Contest on Tuesday after months of preparation.
Practicing for the drill began in August, however band director Scott Mason knows that the road to state started long before then.
“We start in December, thinking about the show ideas and the music, and we work through the spring on that,” Mason said. “Then we start giving the music to the students in the month of May and we work on that off and on during the summer. Starting Aug. 1, we start working on the drill, we start giving that to the students.”
Rehearsals are a part of being in band that Coppell High School freshman Midori Pedrosa still hasn’t gotten used to.
“There’s a lot of rehearsals, loss of sleep, getting yelled at a lot,” Pedrosa said. “The rehearsals are four to five days a week.”
Prior to the state competition there were other events that tested the band’s skills, including the preliminaries.
“They have a preliminary competition out of 37 bands and then they have the finals of the top ten bands,” Mason said. “We performed at 9 a.m. on Tuesday morning, they had to get up at 3:45 on Tuesday morning to go to rehearsal, and then get to the Alamodome, and then do a performance.”
After placing ninth in preliminaries, the band had one more rehearsal then performed at finals at 10 p.m and placed eighth overall.
Mason is proud of their accomplishment.
“They did very well, I could not have asked them to do better,” Mason said. “It exceeded my expectations because I sat there listening to them during their performance and said ‘OK, that went well, that went well, that went well’ and by the end I said well they did as good as we’re going to do, that was great.”
An important part of the band’s performance was the Coppell High School color guard who traveled with them to state. This year will be the second in color guard for sophomore Alexandria Eason, who felt accomplished after state.
“I really enjoyed [state], I feel like a lot of our hard work went to actual good use,” Eason said. “I was kind of disappointed that we made eighth place because we worked so hard and I thought we deserved better.”
Color guard performed its show titled “Rise”, usually featured during the high school’s football games, at state. Eason is proud of how it was performed.
“I would say that with what I had, I did pretty well,” Eason said. “There were small moments when I feel like weren’t as in time or we weren’t good enough, but I feel like we performed to the best of our ability.”
Mason thinks all of their hard work paid off, not just for the competition, but for learning skills that they can apply outside of the band hall.
“They’ve learned a lot more than how to march,” Mason said. “They’ve learned about a very important part of our musical history, which is some romantic Russian composers. They also learned about this hard work ethic that we have, that never, never give up attitude that we have.”
Pedrosa recounts on the hard work that goes into band program, which has proven to be especially hard her first year of high school. She finds some things particularly hard to master.
“I like being with the band, learning new stuff,” Pedrosa said. “Learning how to play and march at the same time, it takes time. It’s hard to bring your instrument all the way up, because you have to be looking up while you’re playing. It hurts your arms a lot and you have to get used to that.”
Although the band has had an exhausting week, they are already looking ahead towards the next opportunity to preform.
“We’ve been asked to be in the Dallas Veterans Day parade as the lead band, the primary band of the parade,” Mason said. “Three of the parade marshals that are being honored, one of the soldiers is from Coppell so we wanted to be there for him.”
