Famous Maroon Band gets ready for football season
STARKVILLE, Miss. (WCBI) – Many people may not look at band as a sport, but just like the Bulldog football team, The Famous Maroon Band has to put in hours of practice in the Starkville heat to make sure they’re performing at their peak on gameday.
“There is a lot of work that goes into it, so we have been spending the past four days here at band camp, and we still have three or four more days to go. They are long days, we are up here at 7:30am and we do not leave until 9:00 at night and throughout the school year, we will continue to practice an hour every single day,” said Madeline Kelly, MSU senior drum major.
And just like the football team, if one band member misses a beat, it can have a huge impact on the entire performance. That’s why Senior Drum Majors Asher Roe and Kelsei Moore are always communicating with the squad leaders.
“As our director likes to say, if you are in math class and you miss one question, you still get an A, but if one person out here misses a single note, it makes everybody sound wrong. So it is very important that everybody is working together to do things 100 percent right all the time,” said Roe.
“One of the things that we do is try to make sure that we are walking around and making sure the squad leaders know our goal. That goal is to make sure and to entertain, while also having fun,” said Elmore.
With more than 400 members, this year’s band is one of the largest in school history, and a large number of those are freshmen.
MSU drum Major Christopher Jolivette said seeing more people wanting to be a part of the MSU band, is a testament to the atmosphere that has been created at Mississippi State
“It just speaks to the tenacity of the band; we have a wonderful band program with some excellent students. The fact that we have over 150 new people to come in, and that we have around 420 people, it shows that people really enjoy what we do, and they want to be a part of this family,” said Jolivette.
Although band requires a lot of practice and long hours, MSU drum majors and band members said, it is all worth it to be able to showcase their skills in front of tens of thousands of people on gameday.
