by Paul Peters

Created on: December 24, 2008

I believe that marching band should be considered a sport for many reasons including that there is more time involved in it then with other popular sports, it's not any easier, and it takes a lot of skill.

The first reason is that band takes a lot of time and hard work. Band is a long-term commitment that isn't taken lightly in our school. We pretty much devote our lives to band for 3 months of the year. We start before the start of school with practice 2 times a week, and for 2 weeks we go to a band camp where we practice from 9a.m. to 8p.m. Once school starts we practice after school every day until 5 and have a competition every Saturday. We keep this up until the end of October when we go all weekend for the championship at the Erie Veterans Stadium and Syracuse, New York for two exciting competitions. When you add up all the time we practice it ends up being more then 200 hrs. of practice even before adding in all the competition days. That's more than double of some other sports.

Secondly in contrast to the popular belief, band isn't any easier than lets say track and field, it just is different. Many people say that it looks so easy anyone could go out on a field and march around for 10 minutes. It's not like it uses a lot of muscle or anything but I would like to contradict that point. Band isn't easy at all, we just make it look easy. As Christina Jones an Olympic athlete says, "If people think our sport is easy that means we're doing our job because the point is to make it look effortless." In reality though as we play and march around the field we're think about millions of things including, keep our toes up keep our chins up, keep our elbows up, play the right notes, know which way to march and at what tempo to march and play at, and so much more. In other words we're just using our mind as the muscles instead of using extreme amounts of leg or upper body strength.

Lastly, I believe that marching band should be considered a sport because it takes a lot of skill. What you see on the field is people playing an instrument and marching around. What you don't see though is the 3-4 years of practice on that instrument before even joining the marching band. If I were to have just picked up my trumpet and got a good sound out of it the first time I would have been a child protegy. In reality it takes a couple years just to get a decent sound to come out of an instrument. When I first joined band, in eigth grade, I was finally getting used to playing but when they told us we had to march while playing our instruments I was shocked. I never thought that I would be able to pull it off but luckily I did after all the work we put into it.

In conclusion I believe that marching band should be considered a sport because it takes a lot of time, it's not any easier than other sports, and it takes a whole lot of skill. Anyone that contradicts this obviously hasn't every really heard of all the things that we do just to give that 10 minute show to all of those people in the stands.

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