Daniel has had one of those once in a lifetime experiences. The USU football team went to a bowl game and the marching band got to go. Since I wasn’t there, Daniel is my guest blogger to share his experience.
A little bit of context: The USU football team had the best season in school history this year. First season since the 80s with double digit wins, and first Mountain West Championship win in school history. It was our win in the conference championship that landed us into the inaugural Jimmy Kimmel LA Bowl. Because the football team made into the bowl, the marching band was invited as well to come and play for them!
Our trip to the LA Bowl began on Thursday with getting up at 4:00 in the morning to make sure we arrived on time to our frigid 5:00 am call time in the Laub Athletics center. It was below freezing in Logan at the time. We loaded up tour busses, which had stickers placed on the side for the band and were on the road by 5:40. Thursday was spent in the bus traveling to L.A. Twelve hours later and a large amount of stir-crazy band kids later, we arrived at our hotel by LAX. The bus ride was largely uneventful, except for my first experience with LA traffic. Let me tell you, that made me really grateful that we don’t have any place with traffic that bad in the places I go! Once we arrived at the hotel, we were all pretty much done for the day. A few of the saxophonists in the band got together and played a few JackBox Games, but we were all tired from driving all day and so we went to bed.
Friday morning, we went and had breakfast. The university gave us a stipend of about $100 for food, so I ate at no expense. After that we went to do the only rehearsal we had in LA. It was a rather uncanny rehearsal, as we were on a community college field that felt like a high school field and it was 70 degrees. I had to keep reminding myself that it was nearly Christmas. For this game, we had learned a whole new pre-game show to account for the people that couldn’t come with us and an all-new halftime show. We had set the shows the night before we left for LA, so they were all still very new. That being said, we were able to get them on the field really quickly! We had our rehearsal, and then we went and had lunch. After lunch, it was a little bit of down time before we went to the pep rally the night before the game proper. The pep rally consisted of us playing the fight song and the Scotsman a few times along with a few of our other stand tunes in a battle of the bands format with the OSU band. The place they had us do the pep rally just outside SoFi Stadium was not suited for bands, and so the acoustics made hearing the OSU band hard. But I believe that they sounded good, even if we couldn’t hear it! We went back to the hotel and turned in for the night.
Saturday was the day that most of the event occurred. We woke up, and then had breakfast. Afterward, we packed up the hotel and got dressed in our marching band uniforms, which we would spend the rest of the day in. We were out of the hotel by Noon, and we were on our way back to SoFi. We started by walking into the stadium and finding our seats, and all I can say is that it is the nicest stadium I have ever been in. We had to walk down a ramp that led to our seats. We got situated and discovered that the field was 100 feet below ground level. That made it much cooler in the stadium than in the parking lot. We were served a lunch provided by the Aggie Alumni Association in the Toyota Patio area. We hung out there a bit, then we got all lined up, and then played our halftime show, fight song, and the Scotsman for them. After we performed there, we were shepherded down to the field for our pre-game show. In the tunnel on the way down, we ran into the OSU band, and we ran past giving them high fives and fist bumps and wishing them good luck. We got down on into the tunnels and waited a bit. When we were let onto the field to line up on the sidelines, I discovered that the stadium had some of the best turf I had ever stood on. It was easily the nicest field that I have ever been on! We got all lined up, got the green light and played our pre-game show. Unfortunately, we were amplified throughout the stadium, so the reverb was really hard to play through, but the marching experience was absolutely amazing!
After pre-game, we went back to our seats to watch the first half. I very quickly discovered that earplugs were mandatory if I wanted to hear anything after the game. The announcer and the sound effects were really loud. We watched the first quarter and most of the second quarter in our seats before heading back down through the stadium to the field to prepare for halftime. When halftime hit, we were treated with the OSU band halftime. The Aggie Marching Band cheered them on quite profusely, and we were probably their biggest fans for a minute. As soon as they were done, we ran onto the field to play our halftime show, which was a reprise of one we had done earlier in the season. We played music from Shrek consisting of Funkytown and I’m a Believer. Once again, the reverb was a problem, but we were successful in working through it and playing a really great show! And once again, I was struck with how nice the turf was.
We finished our show and went back to our seats, where we played our short tunes and other stand tunes when we could. Once again, the volume of the stadium was crazy loud. We watched the third and fourth quarters and we all went bananas when we somehow managed to win the game! The technology in the stadium was really cool, as whenever either team did anything, the stadium’s many screens would change the accent colors of the stadium to that team’s colors and seeing the stadium blue and white with the proclamation that we had won was an exhilarating experience! After the win and the awards ceremony, we headed out to the parking lot where we were able to briefly meet the OSU band. We were fed dinner and we changed out of our uniforms. We ended up driving through the night to get back into Logan around 1:00 pm. It was another 12-hour stint on the bus, but I was glad to be off the bus and in December weather again. I rested that day and then drove home for Christmas that Monday. All in all, I think that the LA Bowl was a ton of fun! It’s experiences and performances like that that drew me back to marching band in college. It was a blast!
