The Positions

There were many comments made all year as to why we had so many leadership positions in the Marching Band.  So many comments that we had to rethink the number of student leadership positions.  For one thing, this is an army and students need to help so that we can get everything accomplished.  Another important part of the marching band is the leadership training that comes from being in the band, whether you are a leader or not.  There are very few venues available to a high school student where they get first hand experience in the actual building of a program, whether it be corporate, a team, or a social group.  The marching band is a great group to teach these lessons of life.  A self proclaimed specialist at motivation, team building, character building, and goal setting, I am totally immersing every member of the band into these important facets of life.  I affectionately call it CD - or Character Development.  One perfect example is the building of this band and getting the judges to see and reward us for what we have accomplished.  As you know from reading this blog regularly, this is no easy task.  We were somewhat able to move the numbers, but clearly not as much as we expected.  There comes the growth lesson.  Be resilient, bounce back, come back harder and stronger and persevere.  

So here we are, we had 36 leaders last year,  30% of the band.  This year we are honing it down to 24, which is still a huge 20% of the band.  As a staff, we feel that 24 is a great number to work with..

We are adding two new positions, I originally called it Lieutenants although the name didn't quite fit.  We switched it to Chief of Captains.  I got the idea from the title "Chief of Staff" for the President.  I think it is fitting to what it will be, the captains in charge of the captains.  They will be the leaders of the program in music and marching as long as we stick to the "no talking" rule on the field when Mr. Bennett and Mr. Downey are teaching drill.  

The decisions have been made, Ms. Miller and I did the interviews and are just waiting until the end of the week to post the final list.  We want to be totally comfortable with our decisions.  It will be posted on the roslynband.com website on Friday night, November 21st at 8pm.  The interviews and essays went extremely well, we have some amazing people here at Roslyn, which makes the decisions that much harder.

I will be posting a blog daily this week in preparation for the posting of the leadership positions, to let you know how we came to the decision on 4 drum majors, announcement of next year's show, and the posting of the audio so you can start getting psyched for next year.  

I will also be posting some quotes for those of you who get positions, and those who don't. Quotes from the great leaders in our world help me to deal with those speed bumps in life.