Owasso Invitational Marching Contest

Two weekends ago was the first out of town contest for our band.  We traveled to Owasso, OK in the Eastern part of the state.  Let me say, I think our band is great.  Especially with almost half of them being freshmen.  And I thought we had a pretty large band...I mean, we have 185 members.  But some of the schools that were at the Owasso Competition had 250 and even 300 members in their bands.  They were HUGE!

I learned a little more about band competitions...first off, your band ranking isn't necessarily the same as your school ranking.  Southmoore is a 6A school...but when it comes to band, we are a 3A band.  Who knew?  I also learned that in preliminaries, you are scored against those in your division.  But in finals, everyone is scored together.

We didn't so well in our preliminary performance, but we managed to pull out a 3rd place ranking in the 3A division (out of five 3A bands).  There were 19 bands total in the prelims and only 12 make it to finals.  I was sweatin' it when they announced who was going on.  Let me just say, I about fell on the ground when they announced Southmoore.  We apparently squeaked into finals by our musical performance...but our visual performance was sorely lacking.  We did better in our finals performance, but still not good enough.  We ranked 11th in finals.

I was very impressed by the top three schools (Union, Coweta, and PC North).  It was so neat to watch such stellar groups.  We are still a young music program and I am looking forward to Southmoore rising to such grand levels.

Tomorrow we head back East to the Renegade Review Marching Contest at Union HS in Tulsa.  We'll be up against some pretty big bands again, but I know our kids have been working really hard the past two weeks and I hope they can walk away proud of their performance this weekend.

(On another note...during the downtime during the day at Owasso...Quinn mustered the nerve and asked a girl to be his girlfriend...shhhh...don't tell him I told you.  Maybe he'll let me do a real post about it...of course, I need to be officially introduced to her first.)