The Union County High School Band continued to live up to its reputation of exceptional talent when students took home all Superior ratings – the highest possible – on Oct. 25 at the Peach State Marching Competition.
Band Director Will Stafford said his intent in taking his students to the competition was to show them what quality looked like, and although he never doubted their abilities, he was pleasantly surprised to find that they finished so close to the top.
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Taking place in Barron Stadium in Downtown Rome, the Peach State Marching Competition is the longest continuously running marching band competition in Georgia, hosting groups from across the state as well as Alabama.
So long as participating bands pay the registration fee, anyone can join, but Stafford said it’s known for hosting some of the best bands in the region.
All bands are sorted into classes based on number of wind instrument players, accounting all the way up to AAAA and Open classes. UCHS was part of the 2A category, defined as an inclusion of 41 to 59 winds.
Stafford noted that it’s rare for smaller bands to compete against much larger bands, but the Peach State Marching Competition offers the unique opportunity for smaller groups like those at a 2A size to compare their sound. In total, the UCHS Band has 77 members.
While they do go to competitions every year, it’s not often that UCHS gets to play at an elite event like the Peach State Competition. Stafford decided to take that opportunity this year, and his decision resulted in the first time Union County has won at that particular competition.
Practice has been going on since July. As Stafford said, students “gave up their last two weeks of summer” to participate in two 40-hour weeks of band camp. When the school year started, practice continued in class, and members spent six hours weekly rehearsing outside of school.
“They’re grading both their musical performance and their visual performance,” explained Stafford, adding that while sound quality and ability factor into competitive grading, students are also judged based on how well they mesh and what their marching technique looks like.
Essentially, those levels of contrast and variety come down to, “Do the visual components of the show align with the musical components of the show?”
For Union County, the answer was a resounding “yes.” Their theme, beloved by both young and old for its utilization of ’80s music, was based on the popular show “Stranger Things.”
In all four categories – Drum Major, Guard, Percussion and Band – UCHS received top scores, and out of the six other bands competing in the 2A and all seven competitors in the A category, UCHS received First Place.
Overall, the Union County students received Fourth Place out of the 20 bands that signed up for the event.
To top it all off, the students also earned the Carruth/Shook Award for Outstanding Musical Performance and the David Walters Grand Champion Award. This meant a total of five trophies came home to Blairsville, and when the students found out that all their hard work had come to fruition, they were ecstatic.
“They were screaming and just celebrating and chanting about it – it was quite the scene, I will say that,” said Stafford. “They erupted spontaneously into singing our school fight song.”
Stafford videoed the exciting moment, which included some band members dancing and cheering with pride. Even after other participants left the field, UCHS students stuck around to celebrate a little while longer before heading back home.
“We were within two points of winning the entire marching competition, and that includes bands that had 200 members,” Stafford noted, beaming with pride for his kids. “We’ve never, in my career, won a grand championship.”
And of course, they don’t plan on giving up anytime soon.
