ENGLEWOOD – In marching band, you’ll likely meet everyone during band camp before school starts, including other freshmen starting with you. Band captain Sebastian Holmes tells me that made the transition to high school easier.
“Because you have friends to work on homework with. You have friends to teach you things,” Holmes says.
His band director, Philip Eyrich, has taught here since Sebastian was a sophomore. He’s maintained the quality of the band. They’ve scored overall excellents the past two years in their annual marching assessment, always just one judge’s score away from getting an overall superior rating.
Could this year be the year they get that superior? With their show Aztec fire, it could be. Aztec Fire allows the band to light the field on fire, figuratively speaking.
It’s not a large band, but they get to go big with their sound in their opening theme.
They spent this practice working on their opener, so I had to ask what the rest of the show was like. Besides Oye Como Va in the middle of the show, none of the music is pop, which drum major Hailee Roderick loves.
And to get that desired superior rating for Aztec Fire, it requires many hours of practice each week around the same group of people, usually in the hot sun. You might think would grate on most of the kids, but as Hailee told me, “I have never enjoyed being around the same group of people for so long. If you have a study group or you’re hanging around the same people in the class, you can easily get annoyed with them. I feel with the band, we’re just so close-knit. The long practices and stuff, sometimes it doesn’t even feel like it’s that long because you’re with people you enjoy,” she says.
