Many students find themselves thinking: "Why am I here? What possessed me to do this stupid activity?" What am I talking about, marching band of course. You know, spending hours at a time outside in the hot sun in the middle of summer, spending a week at band camp, only to come home with a horrible tan, and spending every week at the football stadium in the cold and rain. What would make a person want to do that, for years, four of them actually?
It could start with being told that you have to stay in band by your parents because they spent all that money on your instrument, and being told that in order to be in band you have to be in marching band as well. Or it could be because your best friend in the whole world is a complete band geek and they tricked you into finding out what the band world is really all about. There are many ways to get involved with band, but all of them lead to the same exact thing, becoming a band geek.
You start your career out as a freshman on you first day, in late June or early July. You show up at your new high school trying to find your friend that you sat next to during your middle school band days. After finding them you get told that you won't need instruments and to follow the director outside. Once you are outside you are on some nasty looking field, the left over one that none of the sport teams wanted because it was that bad. You form a bad block and stare at the director and the kids around you, from only a few others to a ton of kids that you don't know, depending on how many show up. After being told that this is where you will soon being basically living, you are taught a few warm ups and the cheers that you will learn to love and rewrite so they are even "better". After that you spend the rest of "freshmen camp" learning how to march like a pro.
Soon the rest of the band joins you and you are stuck with them. All the perverted jokes, all the stories, and all the fun of the older, cooler kids. You learn who is cool and fun and who is going to be your biggest rival during high school. You start to learn some music and you learn how to play and march at the same time.
Soon band camp starts, you may go away or you may stay at school. Either way you end up loving your section and the sections that you will learn to get along with, then when school starts you will have a killer tan.
Then school starts, the excitement of having a new school and being "grown up", with a major help, you know a few kids that are older, making you cooler than your non-band friends.
Enter football games. You get all dressed up in your uniform, make your way to the stadium, and march in. After playing in the stands for the first half, you learn what game time really is, halftime. That wonderful phrase "halftime is game time" the one you will love and tell to ever football player that you meet. You play your part out, convinced that you will mess it all up and the band will hate you forever. Play it near perfectly and make you director cry because of the promise they see in the season.
You play for games, parades, go to contests to play your heart out and hope to be the best. You witness cadences, band dances, and countless shows that you will remember forever.
Now what does this do to make you love this "sport" as you will soon be calling it? It's that rush you get when you hear the words "band ten hut", that feeling you get when you hear a drumline playing, those jokes you know, the fact that yes the band can take the football team, and the knowledge that you will have friends for the next four years. Your band friends, the ones that you love because you have to, because you spent the summer with them.
That's what makes us all get up and go out to that field that the soccer team uses when they feel like it, the one that the football players point at, and the one that has no grass because you killed it all. That rush of life, that joy that you get after playing a pep rally, knowing that they may laugh, but the football team loves you anyway.
That's what makes you a band geek.
A/N: I apologize for mistakes, errors, or other synonyms for idiotic things I did. This just came to me and I decided that it would be a good idea to tell you what band geek means to us, the band.