All I learned about football I learned through marching band. So basically, after spending nine years of participating in marching band from high school to college and in my professional life, I barely understand the broad outlines of the game.
But…I loved being in marching band.
I don’t know why and how I fell in love with marching band so quickly. Standing in the rain my sophomore year being yelled at to stand at attention, turn quarter turns in unison, and be trained to be yell in loud responses was really alien to me. Remember I had never been in an organized sports team, I had never done anything like a drill with other people in unison, I had never really watched a football game, or actually seen a marching band perform. You’d think with that background I wouldn’t like standing in the rain being yelled at…but something about it made sense and felt great.
Marching band taught me one ways that human beings bond is through suffering. As humans have evolved, many of us live with layers of privilege that shield us from the types of suffering that helped our ancestors develop a sense of community, which is essential for human meaning. Examples of the ways we create suffering are as interesting as they are absurd: golf, dance marathons, running marathons, and trying to coordinate line art on a football field with a couple other hundred teenagers while playing glorified noisemakers, otherwise known as a marching band.
There was cheering, playing pop songs, being miserable in the rain, and it all felt right because it all made me feel like I belonged. My high school marching band was what I call a “family style” marching band. The focus was more on having fun, and feeling successful and included than marching at a competitions, which we didn’t do. I’m so glad that this band was like this because I was in this group with seniors who had been in this band for four years, and sophomores in my grade who had been playing their instrument for at least four years, while I had only been playing for a couple month. However, none of that seemed to matter, I was in the band.
Marching season eventually turned into concert band which opened me up to a whole world of music. There was basketball pep, which was a blast. Again, I barely understood the game, but it didn’t matter. It was about being in a tribe, chanting, playing and screaming.
I fell so hard for band, my senior year before my senior year I came up with the crazy idea to be a TA for the freshmen band. I continued my math tutoring work, and PE independent studies, which I needed to do to make space in my schedule to take band and orchestra, and somehow my parents helped make this work for me.
I loved my time with those freshmen, but more than anything, what I loved the most ways helping through marching band season. It gave me the taste of teaching that I would later find out was my calling. Those freshmen meant more to me than many of the seniors in my class, and I often think back at these wonderful people I had the opportunity to mentor.
When I looked for colleges, one of the factors I considered was finding a college that had a “family style” marching band, and I’m so glad that I did, because I would not have made it through college without my band family. It was in that band family I met my wife.
It all started with the fight song. Joining band in high school forever changed my life, and set in me in a wonderful direction that has taken me places beyond my understood potential, and to experience I never imagined and will never forget.
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