With the start of a new football season comes an aspect of our sports events that often gets overlooked: the CHS pep band. For those who don’t know, the CHS pep band is a group of instrumentalists who play at sports events to hype up the crowd. Led by band director Kent Chalmers, the CHS pep band encompasses students from the CHS and CMS bands. The band performs at football and basketball games, providing pregame plus halftime entertainment.
“It’s a really good community,” says sophomore and melophonist Judah Lewis when asked about his favorite parts of playing in the pep band. “Mr Chalmers is an amazing band director, I get to be with my friends [in the band], and it’s really fun to play music with people.” That being said, pep band’s members do need to put in quite a bit of effort, given that they have to learn so many songs. “It [the band] requires a lot of practice on my instrument,” Lewis says on the matter.
The band members aren’t the only ones putting in major effort, however. Director Kent Chalmers has his fair share of work as well.
“Every year has its challenges,” he says. “One of the big ones is [finding out] what is going to be the weak link in our group this year, and how do we make sure that that gets covered and sounding good.”
Something unique about the CHS pep band is that they fill the “dead space,” as Chalmers puts it, throughout the whole game. This contrasts with most other pep bands, which only play during pregame and halftime. This is mainly because pep bands aren’t allowed to perform while a game is in session. While beneficial for players who don’t want to be distracted, this can cause a lot of awkward silence for an audience in between plays. And while bands are allowed to perform during mid-game timeouts, most of the time they can’t since their songs are longer than a break normally is. The CHS band solves this problem by playing short songs during timeouts.
“I [as a band director] cover the length of a game pretty well,” Chalmers says. “People [the audience] don’t get much of a break where there’s not much going on.” The short songs the band plays, dubbed “Timeout Stuff,” are usually recognizable melodies that can repeat for however long a timeout could be.
However, something less fun about pep band is that despite its efforts toward the contrary, it often gets ignored. A situation like this happens a lot: the pep band will perform a song, only to get a completely blank response from the audience. This has been noticed by its members too.
“We can put in a lot of effort,” Judah Lewis says, “and a lot of the crowd probably won’t notice that; it’ll just be background noise [for them.]” While occasionally the band will get some cheering, and surely anyone watching the band can appreciate them, the fact remains that there simply isn’t much excitement for the pep band. And there clearly should be, since a pep band’s whole job is to get a crowd hyped.
“If you see us playing,” says sophomore, trumpetist, and pep band member Aaron Beardslee when asked about this, “make sure to acknowledge us.”
