This year’s show will be called Juno, as followers of the Hope Public Schools Bands facebook site will already be aware, and the first performance of it that Bobcat and Hope Band fans will see will happen at halftime of the September 6th home game. At the halftime break of Nashville at Hope will occur this season’s Hope High Band debut.
At Monday’s Lion’s Club meeting, at which Chris Davis, director of Hope Public School’s bands, came to pick up a $1,000 donation to the Band Boosters, he said the September 6th performance will feature about 2/3 of the show.
Davis, director of Hope Public Schools’ band program said his high schoolers are ahead of the pace right now in learning the show’s music and moves. “They're doing great, absolutely fantastic. They're much further along than they were last year, and it's a complete culture shock to the upperclassmen.” he said, referring to the level of motivation being brought to this year’s band by new members.
“They're finally at the point where they understand it's their program, not the directors’. We make jokes all the time, saying we've already done our time; it's your time now,” Davis said. “This is your program. What do you want? It’s 90-something kids, and we hardly ever have but maybe two or three miss a rehearsal at most. It's been like that since early July.”
As hard as the band works, though, there is a measure of restraint pertaining to outdoor temperatures, as Davis explained. “We have wet bulbs. We have tents, shades, ice baths. When it gets to a certain temperature on the wet bulb reading, it's not safe to go outside, so [we] just stay inside.” Wet bulb measures consider the effect of atmospheric conditions on the human body. They register heat and also the rate of evaporation. The reading determines whether to rehearse in or outdoors.
On the typical school day, Davis said, students begin to arrive in the band hall at 7:30 a.m. The band then spends the time up to 8:45 in rehearsals, either on the field or indoors.
As well as working toward dazzling performances at halftime, band members are putting in the work to impress judges at nine contests this year. Davis commented on the role of each contest in refining the band’s productions as the weeks go by.
· September 21: Cabot Invitational at Cabot High School. “We haven't been to Cabot in a long time. … The first time we pull up to Cabot, the day before 30 percent of the band was quarantined. We still went. It’s a harder contest, depending what size school you are. We're in the awkward stage of being a small school but classified as a larger school. … [In] early contests, feedback is crucial. We want these kids exposed to all the bands in the state, and we just want them to see bands early on. … I want to make shows early on. … At these contests, they're nitpicky and they are trying to find something wrong. We [Hope directors] can tell [the students] all day long, but--every band director laughs when I say this--if someone else says it, they're going to listen more.”
· September 28: Legacy Marching Invitational at Bryant High School. “This will be, I think, our third time going. It's a fantastic contest. They literally bring in nationally accredited judges, like hardcore people. Last year it was the best feedback all year long. This year we're going back again. It's a prelims-finals contest, so it's a very long day. If we make it to finals, we're probably going to perform really early. … It lets the kids see Bryant, lets the kids see Lake Hamilton, the 5A state champs They're eight, nine times state champs, their school lives and breathes marching band and concert bands. … We're the small dogs, and these are the big boys. And if we want to compete with the big boys, this is what we’ve got to do.’
· October 1: Fireant Classic: Percussion at Hooks High School. “It's just a profession contest. They go and play their music. They can play some drum cadences. It's a fun contest for the percussion kids. While all the band here practices, the percussion is going to get on a bus and go play and get some feedback from percussion people and see percussion people and see how they respond.”
· October 8: Beaver Dam Contest at Glen Rose High School. “I had joked with the kids about it. I said, ‘Hey, we're not going to go to this contest.’ And they actually got really upset. This is a local contest. It's not far. A lot of smaller bands. Some big schools will come but nothing bigger than a 5A one last year. We were the third largest band. … We won the grand champion trophy. It's huge. It's four feet tall. It's out there. I'll show you later. No, but we won that last year, and I said, ‘Okay, maybe we shouldn't go again this year.’ … And one of my seniors made a comment saying, ‘I think we should go, not for us, but so the other bands can see, because a lot of people in the state know that we were literally under 20 kids within the decade. So we see these bands, and they know where we came from. A lot of the directors do as well.’ It was a very mature thing for him to say, ‘Let's go and show them what can happen, even if you're in a small school.”
· October 12: Power Band Classic at Lake Hamilton High School. “It’s a lot like Bryant. I haven't been personally, but it's a preliminary finals contest. People from all over this area are going. Big bands go. Schools like Arkadelphia have gone. Perryville’s gone. Conway goes. It's a tough contest. It’s prelim-finals. If the kids perform well enough, and they may get asked to go back to the finals and perform again [that day].”
· October 19: Razorback Marching Invitational at Arkansas High School. Davis explained that this date occurs during a time Hope schools are closed as part of their new hybrid calendar. The directors did not want to have a not-as-well-attended Saturday rehearsal prior to the state contest. “It's down the road. It's an afternoon contest. So, if we want to, we can even come up here in the morning and have a rehearsal, have a lunch and then still go and still have plenty of time … Last year, we had a four-day weekend and then a regional and only a few of them forgot things here and there. The judges are looking. They go out of their way to find things that are not good.”
· October 22: Region 2 Marching Assessment at Arkansas High School. On the Monday before this Tuesday contest, Davis said he will have a clinic in which a retired band director or two is invited to assess the state of the band’s show. “It's like our state test. It's got a rubric everyone uses. … Five is poor, four is fair, three is good, two is excellent and one is superior. The goal is to get superior performances, which essentially means there's pretty much no mistakes at all, and an excellent is a few mistakes.”
· October 26: Paragould-McDonald’s Marching Invitational at Paragould High School. “That's going to be a fun contest. We go up. It's a four-and-a-half-hour drive. We went a couple years ago. The kids absolutely loved it, because Paragould is the eight, nine time state champion in 5A, and they didn't build that kingdom overnight. It's a culture that's been driven for 30, 40, 50 years. That’s a band town. They also have Greene County Tech in the same town, which is interesting because Greene County Tech was third place in state 6A. Now they’ve moved up to 5A. They have two of the best bands, 5A and up, in the whole state, and now they're in the same class, and they're the same town, and that town just loves music. But we decided to go back. We went a few years ago. The kids absolutely loved it. The culture was there. All the schools that were there loved it. There's schools from Tennessee that were there. It’s just a bunch of band kids, thousands of band kids, being in one place having fun.”
· November 5: State Marching Contest at War Memorial Stadium. “We're interested to see how we're going to do this year. We have an interesting show, and if the kids buy into it, which they are right now, we'll do fine. We tell them it's not about the placements, it's not about how high you are on the leaderboard. Were you better than were you yesterday? If you close your eyes and wake up and the next day, you're better, that means you've won something. … We were in the top six last year, which is fantastic, absolutely fantastic. We were never more proud of the kids. Now, we had a whole lot of hiccups last year. Our soundboard broke on us. Mics weren’t working. We had a tuba player out, because he got hurt in football.” Davis said that because of the mistakes, many band students feel they have a good chance of placing higher this year, but he tells them he will be pleased “as long as you’re better than you were.”
Davis said when he first came to Hope from Pocahontas, he quickly became aware of the band’s past as the multiple-award-winning Superband by seeing some videos of its performances. When he realized how the town had supported the band in the past and that many parents and grandparents who had been in those bands themselves are still here, he became convinced that big improvement was possible. “It's still there, so we had to find it, and we're starting to see it,” Davis said. “Some Superband alumni have kids in the program. It's always been there. I think it was just finding a way to reach it.”
(Photos Taken by Ethan Houk)
