The marching band takes the field at Lucas Oil Stadium tonight in the preliminary round of the Indy Super Regional competition. This will be the band’s first time performing in Lucas Oil this year in addition to being the first Band’s of America (BOA) regional competition that the band will perform in this year.
“Lucas Oil is pretty true to us, and we’ve been fortunate to have been there quite a few times,” director Kevin Schuessler said. “The biggest thing is just filling up that space. We’ve talked about projection and we’ve talked about resonance and filling up the sound. We don’t want [the marchers] to go into that venue and play differently.”
Last season, the band finished ninth out of 60 bands in the super regional. This year there will be 90 bands competing at the super regional. Since June, the band has been working on getting the show prepared so that they can put on a performance that will advance them through to the finals Saturday night.
“Part of the element of our show this year is we have a lot of fast tempos,” Schuessler said. “It’s something where we talked to them before we got into the summer about conditioning. This is where it pays off because in any football game that anybody has seen us here, they’ve only seen two, four or six minutes of the show. Now we’ll have eight minutes of the show, and we’ll be running it at full tempo.”
Most band competitions are outdoor, which means that the sound emitted from marchers instruments travels over a large surface area. However, Lucas Oil Stadium is an indoor stadium, meaning that sound bounces off of the walls and roof of the stadium and creates an echo. The echo can affect how the group, especially those inexperienced with the venue, perform.
“For less experienced people, it will definitely be difficult because you’ve never done that before,” Junior marimba player Deacon Norman said. “You don’t really know how to project your sound and we’ve never performed in front of that big of a crowd. For us more experienced people, it’s pretty normal because we’ve done it a few years before so we know where to look and what to expect from all those people [in the crowd].”
Sound reverberation isn’t the only challenge the band faces. With a competition like the Indy Super Regional, there can be nerves going into a competition. To combat these nervous jitters, the marchers have different ways they like to keep themselves calm.
“Personally, I have a playlist that I listen to,” junior color guard member Kate Cecil said. “Some people like to mentally go through their part of the show and some people like to talk about different things that they want to work on. It’s kind of the same for each show.”
The band has not performed at a large stadium this season as they didn’t travel to Louisville, Kentucky for a competition in September canceled by Hurricane Helene. The Louisville Regional competition would have been held in the L&N Federal Credit Union Stadium, a venue closer in size to Lucas Oil. With the size being so similar it would’ve been a preview to the marchers of what to expect and what kind of nerves there would be seeing the size from the field. This time around, the band will experience all of those nerves going into a stadium that they will see at least two more times this season.
“I honestly would say a lot of people feel the nerves when they are passing the ramp where you can look out onto the field, which I did too,” Senior drum major Sophia Smith said. “I also feel like a big thing is where you can hear those bands from Texas or the big marching band states having the music portion of the rehearsal in the same room. You just can’t hear anyone or anything besides just loud music and that’s just kind of when it hits.”
With a good performance in prelims, the band hopes to make finals to help gain some momentum going into some of their last performances of the season.
“The goal is definitely to make the top 14,” Schuessler said. “We also want to just have a very solid performance within Lucas Oil because it is so different from any of the other places that we have performed in this year.”
