My column this week looks at high school marching bands as probably the most visible of all public school arts programs, and encourages football game audiences to appreciate what they do as well as the teams.  Interspersed are some memories of my own experience from those years.  Here’s an excerpt.

In marching bands, the music and the marching are two distinct and separate challenges that must be learned to perfection and then molded together. You have to know where you are on the field at all times and whether the line you just marched over was the 30, or the 35, or the 40-yard line. Because my high school marched military style (big blocks of players always moving back and forth) one wrong move could trigger an entire avalanche of subsequent wrong moves that would bring the whole show crashing down in a confused scrum. In fact, my high school band director Glen Oliver was the first person I ever heard use the phrase “train wreck” to describe something other than a literal train wreck.  Each year we could count on having a vivid example of just what he was talking about.

Read the whole thing here.