Photo Credit: VHS Sailor Alumni Band
A Message from Joe Price to the VHS Alumni Band
(We’re just the humble messengers – please read below in its entirety for all details.)
Dear Most Valued Alumni,
We are now two months away from our annual performance at the 2025 Sailor Marching Band Festival, which will be held on Saturday, September 13th and it’s time for you to begin letting me know if you will be able to attend and be a part of this year’s gala event. After reading, please reply to this email with your (hopefully) affirmative response and also let me know what instrument you will be playing and if you need that instrument from the school or what auxiliary you’re participating with.
At the end of this lengthy email is a QR code which will take you to a Google Form where you and others can fill in and send me some basic info. You can also just simply reply to this email.
This year we will again have our usual “three-ring circus” with flags, majorettes & playing members drawing on their wealth of experience to entertain the festival crowd. As is our custom, we’re putting a show together that will be high energy and very entertaining.
In order to make this happen, we will have a music practice on the Saturday before (9/6) from 9–11 AM at VHS. This one is not required, but if you can make it, it will certainly help many of you learn the music. If you’re in the guard or majorettes, your advisors might also want to work with you on that morning.
On the festival day we begin rehearsals at 9 AM sharp, break for lunch at noon, return at 1 PM and rehearse as long as we need to or are able to. The Festival begins at 6:00 PM and we, as Alumni Band participants, get in free. Whoopie!
Please don’t assume that I know that you’ll be there—respond to this email or somehow get in contact with me. This letter was sent to you with my most recent email address, which I prefer you use.
If you’d like to look at the music ahead of time, I can get the music to you via email. You should include that request in your positive response.
Usually the week before the festival I start sketching drill and I “flesh” it in and assign names to squads for the number of marchers that I have on the list a day or two before the festival day.
I don’t have a Facebook page and I won’t be getting one, so if you don’t do emails anymore, please contact my bride, Pat, or my daughter Mary Ana Hicks so I can get the word through them since they both do Facebook. If you would also contact your friends individually, that will also help immensely. Twist their arm, use gentle, yet effective encouragement—whatever it takes. Give them my email or point them to the QR code because sometimes people change their email addresses and don’t remember to get that change to me so I can keep them in the loop.
Starting today, I will be at my computer desk both day and night (I don’t sleep very much) with pen in hand and legal pad at the ready, awaiting to add you to the list of positive responses.
If you can’t join us this year, write back to me anyway. I always love to hear from all of you, especially you recent grads, who I didn’t have the honor of having in my bands. I will be interested in what is happening in your lives and I do respond to all the emails I get from you.
We don’t require you to memorize your music for our performances and we do use lyres and you can carry your music on the field, if you so choose. I don’t have a source for any other necessary materials (lyres, sticks, reeds, valve oil, etc.), so if you need any of those things, you’ll need to get them on your own. Amazon has nearly everything you’d need.
DRESS: This is the 3rd year of our transition to purple shirts with gold lettering (I’m sure you’ve seen them), with the group name on the front and your grad year on the back. A (very) few of our members will still wear the yellow shirts, but we’re hoping to return to complete uniformity by next year.
We will order the shirts for you and we do need to get that order in at least a week ahead of time so we can have it for you on the day of the festival. Again, good time to order a shirt is when you let me know that you’ll be marching with us. I’ll need to know what size you’ll need and what your grad year was. I never know exactly what the new shirts will cost, but I’m guessing that it should be around $20.
Bottoms: We will continue to wear light tan, khaki slacks. They present a nice contrast on the field—especially with the purple shirt and the green grass. Avoid blue jeans like the plague. Tennies are fine on your feet as long as they’re not hot pink, fluorescent green or some other garish color.
On the festival day, if the weather gets cold, putting something white, purple or gold (see a theme here?) under the band shirt is perfectly acceptable. Maybe ordering your shirt a size larger so you can wear something under it wouldn’t be a bad idea. If it gets really cold (unlikely, but this is northern Ohio) we’ll be more interested in warmth than uniformity. If it rains—well, you’re on your own, but—it’s not going to rain.
We try to keep what we have to learn on the festival day doable in the short amount of time we have, so we only learn one drill (an opener), stand in concert and play a majorette and guard features. We’ll do a down-front (reset) number, go back to concert and we come off the field to the Fight Song. We also do high-step on the sideline. We always have the EMS folks standing by for the more mature alumni—just in case.
Each year we have some members who don’t feel that they can march the opening drill but still want to play the standstill songs (that might even be me this year). That is perfectly fine, but if that is you, let me know so I don’t write you into the opening drill.
This year our show will be an eclectic one. Our opener will be a bit of a change from the usual—Fireball, the majorette feature is Joy To The World, the guard will twirl to Old Time Rock n’ Roll, and our reset (down front) tune will be Final Countdown. As mentioned, we come off the field with the Fight Song.
Majorettes: please contact Dawn Clark to indicate your desire to perform.
Guard: contact Jordan (Budka) Luce at jordanbud09@gmail.com
We are always looking for more of our fabulous alumni to help us to put on a fantastic show. I do not have contact info on many of the more recent alumni, so if you know of any of them, tell them about this and have them contact me via my email address or the attached QR code. My address on our website is one that I really don’t use, but you can check out the site if you’d like:
We’d love to have them “do it one more time” with us.
OK instrumentalists—write back to me, find your horn, reacquaint yourself with how it works (determine which end to blow into and where to put your fingers), get a fingering chart off the internet, start practicing. As always—it’s going to be just loads of fun!!
JNP
About the Author
