Baaaaaand, take the field!

A retrospective of my marching band career

The other day was March 4th, which is happens to be national marching band day. On Instagram, the Michigan Marching Band (MMB) encouraged its members to post their favorite marching band memories, and so many of my friends posted pictures of their own personal favorite moments in their marching career, whether they’ve been in band for one year or ten. I didn’t make one of these posts, since I was frankly just too lazy to go through my camera roll and find a good picture to post and since I had already recently posted about this year’s season, but it got me thinking about it.

I’ve been doing marching band, and specifically color guard, for eight years; since my freshman year of high school. Eight years of my life dedicated to this art and this sport (marching band is a sport and I will die on that hill!), which is more time than I’ve put into any other hobby, at least consecutively, and I’ve been reflecting on this a lot recently. It probably won’t be my last time spinning, but I imagine after this summer, I’ll come back for homecoming every once in a while and that’ll be it. My time in marching band is, for all intents and purposes, over.

Marching Band in High School

When I was in eighth grade, about 12/13 (or however old an eighth grader is, I’m bad at math), I saw one of the high schools in the area come to our school and demonstrate some of the arts, including marching band. I watched the color guard, and I actually knew one of the girls that was in it, and I knew I wanted to do that in high school. It was so cool! It was like those rhythmic gymnasts that use the ribbons, but something I could actually do without having to do crazy backflips and stuff. That one day was the catalyst to me doing a hobby that I would proceed to do and make into my personality for the next eight years.

I went to an all-girls school for high school, and since our school wasn’t the one with the football team, I did marching band at our all-boys ‘brother’ school. It was small, like really small. At the largest, the marching band was probably around 50 people, maybe? By my senior year, we were to about 30. The color guard over those four years fluctuated between 5 to 6 people. With how small it was, and because our captain was a senior my freshman year, I became section leader my sophomore through senior year. It was very chill and low pressure. We practiced twice a week and performed at football games on Friday nights after school. It was a fun hobby, and a good way to make some friends. There was also a good overlap between the other performance arts that I was also a part of, like theater and show choir. It was a small community, and I was super passionate about color guard.

So, when it came time to look at colleges, one factor that I took into consideration was whether or not they had a marching band. It was a big factor too, since I really wanted to continue to it in college. I never really cared about football, though, so I mostly guided my decision on google searches of “best college marching bands” and just seeing if they had one at all.

Michigan Marching Band

Talk about going from being a big fish in a little pond to a little fish in a big pond. The MMB was huge. 400 people huge. The color guard my freshman year was around 28 people, which was just about the size of the whole marching band in my senior year of high school. Not only that, but I realized that I was not as good as I thought I was compared to all the rest of the flagline.

It was literally a whole other world to me. It was about 100 times more intense than my high school band ever was. Band week, the two weeks spent before the season started, was 8am to 10pm every day in the heat of august. Once the season started, we practiced every day and before the game (for flags, a noon kickoff meant a wakeup of around 3:30/4 to get hair and makeup ready before practice!). I also learned about something called challenges. Those were a weekly audition for your spot in the block, AKA what people got to perform each game. It was a lot, and it was overwhelming. Little 18 year old me didn’t know how I would survive.

But I did, somehow. Honestly, I don’t know how I did it. First look (our first challenge) happened, and I could barely sleep waiting for the email with the list of everyone who made the game. I wasn’t very sure of myself, but also excited. I had heard that freshman usually didn’t make games, but coming off of Covid, numbers were terribly low: we had about 28 people and block was 24 people. I laid in my dorm bed, sweating buckets and unable to sleep. I kept checking my phone every few minutes, waiting for the email notification. Finally, at 1:42 AM (I just went through my emails and checked) I got the email, and I was shocked and delighted. I was in pregame and halftime. Pregame was even less people than normal: only 20 people. It was so exciting. Ever week, the email was sent out and was never any less nerve wracking, even four years later. But, the rest of that season, I made every game. One game (vividly remember this as Michigan vs Northwestern) I didn’t make pregame, but I was the A-side shadow (the people who will fill in if someone is out on a game day) and still in halftime. We went to the Orange Bowl, and absolutely nothing happened…our performance was top tier and nothing went wrong!! We did get our asses kicked, though. 34-11.

The next three years were full of ups and downs. There were a lot of very notable downs for me, but I got past them. Kinda. My sophomore year, after making every other game that year, I was taken out of our travel game to our big rivalry game against Ohio State. I was absolutely devastated. For home games, even if you aren’t in block, you still get to go to the game with the band and perform in the stands and the parade. But they can only take the block with them to travel games, and all my friends got to go. It was really upsetting at the time, and I still wish I could have gone. We even won for the second year in a row, which many people didn’t think would have happened. I was able to go to the bowl game that year, which was much more exciting than the Orange Bowl but just as disappointing a loss. 51-45.

My junior year started off with a huge disappointment. I tried out for student leadership, and I fully thought that I had it in the bag, but I didn’t make it at all. I was really upset when the list came out in April, and it carried over into the start of the season in August. I got over it quick enough, and the season became much more fun when I wasn’t mad and mopey all the time. That year also just kept getting better and better. I actually started to get into football after six years of being in marching band. The team was incredible that year. We won our third victory against OSU, and went to the bowl game of all bowl games: the Rose Bowl. We were against Alabama, and many people were uncertain of the outcome of the game. Alabama was really good, but Michigan was ranked number 1. We were also a part of the Rose Parade, a 5 mile parade that is incredibly televised and prestigious. It was a very, very, very long day. I was sick, on an empty stomach, and had been awake since about 2 am to get ready. We did the parade, performed pregame and halftime. The score was tied, and the game went into overtime. I thought I was going to have a fucking heart attack, I was so stressed. And guess what (you don’t have to guess, and I think it’s obvious by how I’m talking about this)? We won, 27-20. That was the most exciting thing I had ever experienced in my entire life. I had been screaming for so long that I got an instant headache once I got back into being a normal person and calmed down. More importantly, our win meant that we were going to the National Championship game, against Washington. And then it happened. It wasn’t very exciting coming off of the Rose Bowl. Michigan was never, at any point, losing to Washington. And we won 34-13. It was an incredible season, and I even have a national championship ring.

And then the team sucked. We lost our head coach and many of our good players, naturally. They wanted to capitalize on the win and go to the NFL, or something like that. But we were left with a less than stellar team going up against a very hard schedule. After a few games, Michigan was unranked and we were just kind of OK. I experienced my first home game loss, and then had to watch as Michigan lost every single away game in the regular season (well, almost all of them, but I’ll get there). It was my senior year, and I was finally on the leadership team. Kinda. I was a rank leader candidate, but never made it to a full rank leader. It was upsetting for about a week, and then I realized that being an RLC was so much better for me. I could be fun and whimsical and silly at practice without the major responsibilities of being a rank leader. I was also given the ‘best of the worst’ spot in pregame, and I was content with that. I got to just enjoy my senior year with low stress. We were a mediocre team, I didn’t have a ton of responsibilities. I got to march right next to one of my best friends in every pregame and a fair amount of halftimes (shout out Elena Waltuh), and I finally got my opportunity to go to OSU. We were unranked, and OSU was ranked like 3rd or something. They were good. And guess what? We won. Again. 13-10. It was really funny, and they dropped quite a few places in the rankings after that. A week before that was my last home game, which was full of tears and also joy. A few of my friends from high school came out to visit and watch my last home game, and my girlfriend (who was also in the flags before she graduated and is how we met!) was able to get my parents in the student section so they could see me pretty up close. Seeing them standing there was incredible, and I’ll never forget that day.

December 31st, 2024 marked my last and final football game as a member of the MMB. Michigan vs Alabama at the ReliaQuest bowl in Tampa, Florida, where the unranked Michigan won 19-13 against the team that just barely missed the playoffs. It poured rain during the first quarter, which was both utterly miserable but also really funny. To be honest, our pregame and halftime performances were both less than stellar, but regardless, they were so special to me. It was my definitive last performance with the MMB, my last time doing entries (the entrance that the MMB does for pregame, if you’ve ever seen it), and my last time doing a halftime show. There were a lot of emotions that day, and for the next couple weeks. Even now, its really strange to think about how there won’t be a next year. I still have friends in the band, and I’m planning on going to games to see them and maybe stop by a practice or two to harass them lovingly.

Marching band, and specifically the MMB, is going to continue to be a part of my life, whether I like it or not. My girlfriend and I met in the band and many of my closest friends are ones I met in band. I can see us, 20 years from now, reminiscing about college and band, and probably being those alumni that complain about how things have changed since we were there. I’m a very nostalgic person, so I think and fear that marching band will haunt me for the rest of my life, for better or for worse. But mostly for better, I hope.

This was much longer than I intended this to be, and honestly only scratched the surface of my very complicated relationship with marching band. Hopefully you enjoyed this little retrospective :) And, you know, ignore that this is my first real post and doesn’t match the theme of this blog. Trust me, there will be plenty of on-theme posts in the future.