It was another weekend of marching home with hardware for local high school marching bands.
Chandler High School competed at the Blue and Grey Marching Classic in Glenpool, winning second place overall in the finals, along with Outstanding Music. In the prelims, the band placed second in class and received Outstanding Drum Major for Karyss Campbell.
“Taking one of the three captions and then, finishing second overall, I mean, blew my expectations out of the water. I didn’t really know what to expect,” said Director Zachary Fisher.
He said he knew there would be a lot of good bands at the competition and thought the band might place somewhere between sixth and eighth, so finishing that high was “just icing on the cake.”
It was a solid competition for the week before the band competes at the Oklahoma Band Association’s (OBA) State Championships on Oct. 10. Fisher said they got a good look at other schools that will be in the same class at OBA. “It was good to see kind of how we stack up against them from a competitive standpoint, but also just good to… it was good for the kids to go and just get a good run in at a place where there’s good competition,” he said. “We’re going to keep working hard and getting better, and we’ll just go, and we’ll give our best run and let the, let the chips fall where they may.”
After OBA, the Prideof Chandler faces OSSAA Marching Band Regionals on Oct. 14 in McAlester.
Both Prague High School and McLoud High School competed at Konowa Band Day on Saturday. This was Prague’s first competition of the season, said new Director Isaiah Crawford.
“We’re on a little bit of a rebuild, so we’re going kind of slow,” Crawford said.
The band placed second out of the three schools in the 3A Large class, and out of the 14 competing bands, they came in fourth overall.
“I’m super happy for them. They’re, uh... It’s a lot different this year... they had a interim retired band director last semester, so he, all of his work really helped, I think. Not I think, I know,” Crawford said. “All of his work last spring with them just fundamentally led us to do so well this year.”
Prague will next compete at OSSAA Regionals on Oct. 14 as well.
McLoud High School placed second in Class 4A and received Best Drumline in Class 4A. The colorguard received Best Auxiliary in both Class 4A and overall.
“At our last competition, they didn’t do the best, and they were beating themselves up. And at this one, they just flipped the script and did really good. So they were ecstatic,” said Director Cody Tollison.
He said the band is feeling good, but they have a week and a day until their last competition, so the stress is there.
“Our back is against the wall. We are scrambling to get everything together and put it in the best shape we can,” he said. “We’re fixing music. We’re putting our very last song on the field currently. So it’s just a lot of the fine details with the last little bit we need to fulfill our whole show.”
McLoud will next compete at OSSAA Regionals on Oct. 14. North Rock Creek High School competed this weekend in Tishomingo. They placed first in their division and fourth overall. They will also be competing this coming weekend at OBA.