The cool breeze, the pink sunset, the bright fluorescent Friday night lights. Every American teenager who attends a football game in the fall every Friday, is a part of this. Every band student’s major event in the fall every Friday is the halftime shows.

Marching band attends all of the football games. Creating an atmosphere with students has been the band’s goal.

New traditions are pushing through the cold front this fall to engage the fans.

The band has been under reconstruction for the past year. They have experienced a change in authority, and they now report to Charles O’Brien, band director. O’Brien has given the band countless opportunities to showcase their talents and create a high-energy atmosphere. With that the students have welcomed him in with open arms creating a new relationship with their band director.

“The band in just over a year of me being here has changed significantly. The students have really taken an ownership over the band. They’ve taken me in extremely well, and they have taken everything that I’ve given them in stride, and have been so willing and accepting of new ideas and the future direction of the program as a whole; that’s just been really exciting. The students have been really enthusiastic about the music we’re performing and what things are possible in the places that music could take us and every experience that we’ve had or place that we’ve been has been incredible. We’ve just had an incredible amount of experiences just within the last year-ish that just has students excited about what’s next,” O’Brien said.

With the students taking on new roles this past year there has been a formation of an executive board. Sam Hemr, band president, tells us how this has helped the band this year.

“The leadership team has really helped create a sense of organization in the band room, and I think having that feeling of student leadership has really helped the freshmen feel more welcomed to our band,” Hemr said.

Again changing the direction of the band has helped students and parents navigate what is changing and how things are changing for the band now and for years to come.

Rachel Anderson, drum major, speaks upon how being drum major has not only grown who she is but grown the band as a whole.

“To grow I would definitely say I’m learning a lot about music in general just conducting wise, that I wouldn’t really think of before. Then to grow with the band I think we are just in a rebuilding phase so making band a fun place again, inclusive, and just having fun with it’s like comedic relief,” Anderson said.

Rebuilding has been the bands’ main focus since under the direction of O’Brien.

“As far as new things, our jazz band will be performing at, at least one jazz festival this school year. We are looking at the band attending a Milwaukee Bucks game and performing the national anthem more than likely in January. Other things on the horizon, we have our final marching band concert on Wednesday, Nov. 6 which is in the main gym and we’ll present all of the music we’ve learned this marching band season indoors. Then we also have a December band concert for the first time in a while that will take place in the PAC and I’m excited to switch into concert band mode in the coming weeks and get a concert prepared for December which also might even feature some holiday music as well,” O’Brien said.

With O’Brien’s plans for the rest of the year and going into future years, he aims to get other students involved. He aims to grow student involvement with school spirit, and O’Brien has goals to create more school spirit through music but the band especially.

“My goal is to show the students the value of music and what music could do for a school community in bringing it together. So we spend a lot of time, working on ways to engage with our students and to perform music that’s relevant, that they may enjoy, to get them excited and to just provide a really great atmosphere at sporting events and at pep rallies, and just to be visible so that students see us performing out in the community and throughout the school. Just to show them that we’re doing all these really cool things and that we are capable of sounding really good and doing really cool things,” O’Brien said.

Anderson shared what she thinks about what students outside of the band may think of the band’s performances. But also how she thinks people outside of the band would describe them.

“I would hope that they would say that we are cool people. I think that they like our performances a lot. They always seem to enjoy it when we play at football games.” Anderson said.

Anderson explained how she thinks O’Brien is doing so much good for the band from where they were in years past.

“I think that Mr. O’Brien came in wanting to make our band better, wanting to bring it to what it once was, and I think that we really needed that energy. Spin (Todd Spindler, former band director) was a great band director too, but he was ready to retire, and I think that this is what we needed,” Anderson said.

Looking into the future, O’Brien is constantly thinking about new ideas for concerts and other new upcoming events.

“I’m interested in the near future in doing a night at the movies performance. I think that would be a lot of fun to preform movie soundtracks and even have clips of the movie showing in the PAC while we’re performing the soundtracks and to theme the concert in such a way were it’s like a ‘Night at the Oscars’ and people can even dress up, and there can be a photo booth, and popcorn, in addition to us performing movie music as well. That’s an idea that I’m excited to do in the near future when it works out in our schedule whether it’s at our December concert or at our Spring Benefit concert,” O’Brien said.