The Royal Pride Band competed in their first contest, the Plano East Marching Invitational, this past Saturday, Oct. 6.
As the highest ranked returning band to the contest, they performed last in preliminaries.
“We were 2nd in finals at the contest last year, and because of that people expected us to do well again,” senior and drum major Ryan Gonzalez said. “We were proud to go last and excited to live up to expectations.”
The weather complicated things for the band, with high winds and temperatures in the 50’s.
“When it gets cold, our instruments don’t respond as well and the pitch goes crazy,” junior and soloist Ben Johnson said. “That definitely affected our prelims performance. We didn’t do badly, but I didn’t think we did our best. I knew we could come back and do better in finals if given the chance.”
The top 10 out of 23 bands in preliminaries advanced to finals. The Royal Pride was ranked 5th, behind Wylie, Haltom, Hebron and Marcus.
“It kind of sucked being 5th because I knew we could do better than Wylie,” junior Tori Tennison said. “It wasn’t the best feeling after being 1st in prelims last year either, but being in the middle gave us room for improvement. We were all determined to do better in finals. It was cold, but we toughed it out and tried our hardest.”
After their finals performance, the band felt confident.
“Finals was a lot better than prelims, and the visual aspect was the best we’d ever done,” senior and Vice President Taylor Lowrey said. “But the weather affected our playing pretty badly again. Given the circumstances, we still felt sure we’d done the best we could.”
The band surpassed Wylie and was awarded 4th place.
“We’ve had problems improving from prelims to finals in the past, so it felt awesome to move up,” Ben said. “Beating Wylie and coming close to Haltom was great. The competition was so much harder than last year, with Marcus and Hebron who have both previously gone to and won State, and Haltom who’s gone to State as well. Knowing who beat us and that we were super close to getting 3rd, I wasn’t disappointed at all. It would’ve been nice to be ranked higher, but 4th is a good place to be considering how tough the competition was.”
The band’s next contest is the UIL Marching Contest Saturday Oct. 13, where they will be ranked a score of one through four, one being the best. If the band makes straight ones from each judge, they will advance to the Area Marching Contest.
“I think going into UIL we need to work really hard at playing and marching more confidently,” Ryan said. “If we work our hardest this week, we can definitely do well at UIL and be on our way to Area, then accomplish our goal of going to State.”
Written by Kayla Crowley
Photo by Maddie Derryberry