If your school got selected for a bowl game this year, you know how exciting it is. School pride skyrockets, travel plans are made, and the teams who travel are buzzing with anticipation. These trips are amazing opportunities, not only for football, but for the bands fortunate enough to go as well.
Here's what it's like to be the band at a bowl game:
1. It's exciting
Not only is it a free trip to a fantastic (and most likely warm or tropical) location, you also get to travel with 200+ of your best friends. For some people, it's their first plane ride, or first time traveling that far from home. You get to do what you love, stay in a great hotel, see new things, experience a new city, eat some pretty great food, and of course, play on the field of a major stadium. It's a college nerd's dream.
2. It's exhausting
Rehearsals before the trip can range from a couple hours to all evening, and if your bowl game fell right after the semester, you probably had rehearsal during exam week. So add five hours of band on top of studying, not sleeping, and packing to go home. Ludicrously early call time, travel time to and from the airport, plus on-site rehearsals and all the fun in between takes a lot out of you, but when you lay down to pass out in your wonderful hotel bed and scroll through your pictures from the day's adventures, it's all more than worth it.
3. You get to know everyone a little better
Between assigned seating on the buses, planes, room assignments, sectional time, service projects, and just going out and having fun, you will most likely learn something new about someone, get to know a new friend, or even meet up with people from the rival team's band and spend time with them. The closeness of everyone in the band is always obvious after trips like these. The shared laughs, adventures, and memories bring everyone together.
4. It's a logistical nightmare
Shoutout to the trip planners, directors, and bus captains in charge of getting the schedule together and keeping track of 230 band members, the whole football team, and all the staff. The travel itineraries provided to us were just the tip of the iceberg- us band nerds are glad all we had to do was show up in the right place at the right time and follow directions. We can't imagine the amount of planning and logistics that goes into a trip like this with so many people. (Our band alone used 5 coach buses, two planes, and at least 60 hotel rooms).
5. There's a good chance of overheating
If your bowl game was in a warm location, as many of them are, the whole band community knows: you might pass out. The sun beating down on you in rehearsal, the warmth and sweat that gets trapped in your uniform, long periods without water and a lot of standing around before the game... It's a recipe for sudden unconsciousness, especially if you hail from a state that is currently under several feet of snow. Your uniform (and the buses and planes) will probably never truly smell clean again.
6. You put on the best show you've ever performed
For the bowl game, bands pull out all the stops on the show. We re-chart, reset, clean it up and work our visuals until there's no possible way we could make a mistake. This is where the hours and hours of rehearsal pay off. Unfortunately, unless you got a big bowl game, not many people will see this show. But the satisfaction of knowing you just marched the most high-quality performance of the season is more than enough for us.
7. It's an incredibly memorable experience
There's so many reasons why getting to be a part of a bowl game is a unique and amazing experience. The amazing hotels, the weather, the food, the people, the pictures, the ocean, the memories. Lots of laughs, the friendships that develop, and the whole endeavor are the perfect end to any marching season. Ten out of ten would recommend.
If your band ever gets the opportunity to go to a bowl game, go on the trip. Even if the band doesn't get much screen time or playing time, or if your team loses, the adventure and the memories are well worth the work that is put in. There's truly nothing like a band family.
So, what's it like to be the band at a bowl game?
It's the best.
Thank you to the groups and people who made our trip so successful:
The Royal Palm South Beach Hotel
and our new friends in the Tulsa Marching Band
Love, The Marching Chips
