The Howe High School Marching Band, who has over the years become known as “The Pride of Howe,” went to Ponder on Saturday to compete with 12 other bands in the preliminaries. After their pre-lim performance, they sat as first place overall and and named best auxiliary and best drum major.
After the pre-lims were finished, they took six bands to the finals. Howe competed with Bridgeport, Decatur, Graham, Callisburg and Sanger, all of which are larger schools. None of that mattered as Howe received first place after the Saturday night performance.
Howe is no stranger to band domination. The program has been state champions in 1980, 1995 and 1997. This type of result could give the program the confidence to become Howe’s fourth state champion.
“We won this competition and we were very proud and excited to except the award but we accept it with humility.” said Ashlyn Ellis, captain of the color guard. “We all feel very good about this year and this competition just goes to show us that hard work pays off. I believe that we have what it takes, we just need to continue on the path we have stared and finish it strong.”
Band Director Angie Liss dodged the question of whether or not this band was capable of winning state, however she is quite confident in her performers. “I’m extremely proud of how hard the kids are working and each performance is better than the one before. We all really love this show so we’re having fun and learning so much as we tweak and fine tune all aspects of it. Our football crowd doesn’t get to see it with all the props and bells and whistles since we only pull those out on turf fields but we’re proud of the concept we’ve put together and anxious to see where we can go with it.”
Award winning Drum Major Jessica Doty said, “A performance like this weekend definitely gives you confidence going into future competition especially with UIL starting this week. A great run this weekend was definitely needed as a confidence booster for everyone. We know we need to continue to work even harder to clean our show but this weekend shows how capable our band is of achieving our goals and succeeding this year.”
Great things could be in store in 2015 as the band keeps progressing each week. The Pride of Howe showed why on Saturday.
