The Mill Valley marching band wrapped up their competitive season on Saturday, Oct. 23 at K-State’s “Central States Marching Festival”. The band earned a two rating.

For the performance, the theme was outer space with the musical selections of  “Into the Clouds” by Richard L. Saucedo, “Fly Me to the Moon” by Frank Sinatra and “The Jedi Steps and Finale” by John Williams. Color guard co-captain senior Anna Springer is satisfied with the marching band’s performance despite their rough start after being forced to take a gap year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“My class, the senior class, [are] the only people who have marched in a halftime show, because we now have the juniors and sophomores who have only marched into the stadium and have done nothing more,” Springer said. “And then the freshmen who have not marched at all. So we are starting from almost square one again. The fact that we have started this entire thing, with only one class of maybe 30 people out of the 100 we have in band, knows how to march fully on a field. I’m very proud of all the progress that has been made, because we went from nothing to having an entire show.”

According to head drum major senior Cameron Long, the underclassmen marchers played an integral role in contributing to the band’s long-term success.

“The freshmen and sophomores really put in the hard work because they wanted to help the band get the highest rating that we could,” Long said. “We’re so thankful that the freshmen and sophomores wanted to put in that work, even though we didn’t get a one rating. We did the best that we could with the time that we had.”

While the problem of COVID-19 was absent from this year’s competitive season, the band was forced to pick up the broken pieces from last year’s lack thereof which proved to be an especially colossal task for the band’s leadership team, according to Long.

“We have three festivals,” Long said. Our third festival is the Bonner Springs marching Festival however that was cancelled this year. COVID-19 didn’t really affect this year’s season unlike last year where all three competitions were cancelled. We saw the same amount of time that we would have any other year to learn our shows.”

Despite the less than desirable end to the season, Springer is grateful for the band’s hard work and her opportunity to compete for the last time in high school.

“I’m very proud of everybody on color guard as well as everybody in the band,” Springer said. “I think that we all work extremely hard. We come to evening practices, we all are here at 7:30 in the morning on school days to start practice. I just think that we gave it our all and I’m really proud of what we’ve done.”