Valleyfest

This Saturday was one of the biggest days of the season for the marching band. We headed to West Des Moines Valley for Valley fest which is a really big marching band competition with a lot of good bands. There were even bands from South Dakota and Minnesota. Coincidently one of them was Irondale, who we traveled up north to compete with earlier in the year. This is usually the biggest out of all the competitions for us, but this year we traveled up to Irondale which we don’t usually do. Irondale was probably just as big and competitive as this competition if not more.

Earlier in the day, on Saturday, we had the state competition at Kingston. This is always more of a warm up for the competition later on in the day. Usually this is a pretty enjoyable competition, and don’t get me wrong, it was, minus the fact that it was absolutely freezing outside. Earlier in the day we had a practice and it was actually snowing outside! It was still a fun competition but I could have done without the cold weather. We didn’t stay for the awards because we had to get onto our next competition. We later found out we got a Division 1 scoring here, which is really good. After this we ate lunch and packed up for Valley. I was super excited for the competition, even though it was freezing. The bus ride to Valley usually takes forever but this time it seemed really short. It was probably because it was the most fun I had ever had on a bus ride. I don’t know if it is because I am an upperclassmen now or what, but bus rides seem to just get more and more fun over the years.

When we got to Valley we had to get our game faces on because the bus ride there had been rather rowdy. It was kind of disappointing because usually when we get there we all run around, play games, and eat dinner in the grass but this time it was so cold we didn’t even want to get off the bus. Unfortunately though, we had too, so we hesitantly got off the bus and changed into our uniforms. We then walked to our warm up area to prepare. Another disappointing factor of the night was that usually before our show we have about 10 minutes were we get together with our sections and the seniors give inspirational speeches about how our season is coming to an end and we all need to do our best because this is one of our last competitions and its big. This part of the night was left out for some reason, despite my enthusiasm for it. I guess I always have next year though, when me and the other seniors will get to be the motivational speakers. After our warm up we performed. I thought our performance was pretty good and according to our director we only tore once. Ideally we wouldn’t have torn at all but once is better than twice. Unfortunately, we didn’t do that great in the scoring and we were beat by Washington and Jefferson, our biggest rivals. We usually beat Jefferson but I guess they really stepped their game up. We haven’t gotten a chance to listen to any of the judge’s tapes yet which we will probably do on Tuesday. That will bring more insight into where we really need to work at for next weekend when we go to Ankeny.