Not everyone agrees on what counts as a sport. Although marching bands don’t have the same commercial success as football or basketball, many people regard it as an important source of entertainment and community. ULM’s marching band, The Sound of Today (SOT), supports ULM in the stands and spends countless hours practicing their performances. Students and faculty should be just as appreciative of the band as they are of the players on the field.
Allen Parrish, Ph.D., is the director of The Sound of Today and has worked hard to create a community in the band. While many directors influence competition and negativity, Parrish puts his students first, always putting health and class over everything else. He believes that the band is supposed to be fun. This attitude influences positivity in the band. This feeling is unlike sports where players are driven by wanting to win against another team or player.
“Classifying bands as a sport reduces the activity,” Parrish said. “When you think of a sport you think of competition as the driving factor. The nature of music encourages community; it creates team and group dynamics.”
Unlike other sports where the teams are separated by skill or gender, marching bands create an environment for many different people to interact with each other. There are honorary service groups, the sorority Tau Beta Sigma and the fraternity Kappa Kappa Psi, which anyone can join regardless of gender. These groups help support the band by preparing the practice field, uniforms, and anything else needed by the director. The members, like junior psychology major and Tau Beta Sigma president Tav Blocker, see it as a family.
“Being a part of the SOT, and beyond that apart of TBΣ, gave me a place where I really felt like I belonged,” Blocker said. “My entire time here, the band and its members have been such a warm and welcoming place for me. TBΣ is more than a service org, it also creates sisterhood and gives people a tighter knit community within the band.”
The Sound of Today performs at many exhibitions and parades during the fall. To prepare for shows, they begin in the summer with band camp, and after classes start, they have practice three times a week. Instead of competing against other schools, the SOT usually plays for high school competitions to help excite students from college.
At football and basketball games, the SOT does more than play in the stands. During halftime, they bring excitement, even if the scoreboard does not reflect that. The new members are helping bring the energy to games, like freshman vocal performance major Clare Kerry.
“When things like football games or shows come around, it’s so fun because it’s an array of emotions,” Kerry said. “It’s exciting, it’s deep. That’s the point of why music exists, so we can feel it, and with band you can feel it together and have fun while doing it.”
Many students in The Sound of Today pursue music full time, but there are also many people who join because they are passionate about the community. Marching band
creates a place where people can express themselves musically as future nurses, teachers or scientists.
Marching bands are more than a sport, and the work the SOT does should be better appreciated. With over a hundred different people giving their all, they deserve to have our support. Without it, our other sports would not be the same.
