In high school, I thought I was invincible. I wasn't an athlete - as a freshman, I wasn't even vaguely interested in sports, although I did go on to play lacrosse my sophomore and junior years. Athletic injuries were the last thing on my mind. I was in the marching band, for crying out loud. What could go wrong?
And then I spent four months in physical therapy for knee injuries.
Here's the thing about athletic programs at the high school level: even if the coaches aren't trained to understand the human body and injuries, there are athletic trainers who camp out in their offices or on the field who are. At every game I played as an athlete, there were medically trained people at the sidelines with equipment for taping knees and elbows and ankles. Some of them were med students, or were in training, but they all had some level of knowledge on how to treat athletic injuries.
A finding during a 2009 study conducted by Dr. Gary Granata was that "Whereas most athletic teams are equipped with some sort of medical staff, the majority of high school marching bands is not outfitted with such personnel."
At an Indiana high school whose marching band was the reigning Bands of America champion, 38 percent of the students involved in the band reported suffering injuries on the field. The same study by Granata found that marching band members experience similar athletic activity as track runners, and that many of the injuries are not only leg-related, but heat-related as well.
Nearly a quarter of the students at the same Indiana high school mentioned feeling sick to their stomachs after practice, and more than half had experienced heat-related illness. This I witnessed firsthand during my own two years in marching band.
As a member of a well-respected Orange County, Calif. marching band, I spent 12 hours every Saturday from late August to early December in blistering heat with minimal breaks. Our personnel had no medical training, and had no idea that teaching lunges the wrong way could destroy people's knees (a fact that my physical therapist made quite loudly and angrily).
The level of conditioning we went through resembled things I've seen while doing research on boot camp. On one memorable day - memorable because I almost threw up - we were lined up in parade formation and told to run laps on the track, keeping perfectly in step to the beat of a metronome going at an alarmingly fast tempo.
I'm not saying that marching bands should cut back on the amount of work they do, because the hard work does pay off, in the end. All I'm saying is that if high school marching bands want to put their students through military grade conditioning and activity, medical staff needs to be consulted and on hand.
