Marching out of One Season and into Another

The Fair Grove High School Marching Band’s season has officially ended for the year; their final competition was at Carthage High School on Saturday, October 20th. Forty-eight dedicated members put in a remarkable amount of time and effort this past year in order to participate and be a part of numerous competitions.

The band began their training for this year’s season last spring. Natalie Palomo, Fair Grove’s band teacher, commented, “Our students begin practicing in April before the season begins, working on music. We then have band camp over the summer, and then we have early morning rehearsals every school day except Wednesday during the year. This begins at 6:45 a.m. and goes through first hour.” It is evident that the band was determined to do well if they made a commitment to start practicing last school year.

Natalie Palomo also mentions that song choice is extremely important because they wanted to include songs in their performances that the audience would enjoy. As a result, songs from the movies “The Pink Panther,” “James Bond,” and “Mission: Impossible” were selected by the band.

The band competed in 4 competitions this season. Their first competition was at Carl Junction. At Carl Junction, the team received third. The Ozarko Marching Band Festival was their second competition, which occurred at MSU. At this competition, the band placed fourth, which according to Natalie Palomo, was a huge improvement for the kids. The third competition took place at Reeds Spring. This was not the band’s best performance, but they made up for it in their final competition at Carthage High School. They took third place at Carthage; Danyael Shelton, a senior who plays the tuba, expressed, “We did pretty good because we were 0.05 points from second place.” Overall, the band did quite well this season.

Even though this particular season is over, the band is still looking forward to their next season, which is their concert season. On top of rehearsing for their upcoming concert season, the band is working on music for the Veteran’s Day Assembly. Furthermore, the band will be participating in a couple of parades here and there, but other than that, their next contest will not be until March. Additionally, the group is going to go to Disney World sometime in May to perform in a parade. Everyone in band was thankful to the public for all of the support that their audiences had to offer this season.