To spectators of winter drumline it is an ensemble of drummers performing a complex marching and musical show in schools’ gyms across the state, but to the participants drumline consists of four things; passion, skill, endurance, and pride.

“Passion; we’re all drummers because we really like to drum. We’re those kids in class who tap non-stop. Skill; it takes a lot more skill than most people realize to do what we do. First we have music that had to be memorized, and those aren’t just rhythms that have to be played,” Sophomore Nathan Aaron said.

The drumline also contends with dynamics, sticking, visuals, and the drill. Drill is the drumline’s positions on their tarp. They learn body facing, the counts in their transitions, where to go and whether or not they get there in half, double or normal time. Body is the fancy footwork and body movement. The drumline has to have a rudimentary knowledge of dance technique; doing plies in both warm-ups and their show and marching toe-down on the tarp, which is similar to a dance jazz run.

“If you put all of these things together, it’s a lot to memorize and to tone down to as close to perfection as possible. In other words, yeah, it takes a lot of skill.” Aaron said.

The third element of drumline is endurance.

“Doing what we do requires a lot of control of the body. And that takes strength. Multiply that times how long we practice and how long our show is and you get endurance. We have to have complete control of our body the whole time we march. When we move we can’t simply ‘move’ like you would walking down the street. We have to move with power and control and pride. Along with all of the extra things included with the body work. When you look at a dancer, they have complete control over their body as they move from routine to routine. This goes the same for us. And it all requires strength and endurance.

Pride is who we are. When you watch a drumline play, they perform about one foot taller than they really are. That extra foot is pride. Because someone playing with pride looks 107 percent better than someone who doesn’t,” Aaron said.

The drumline is running into a few snags as this is the first ever year the high school has participated in winter drumline. In any activity, the freshmen learn and mirror those with seniority. For winter drumline, everyone is new and inexperienced except for their coach, Nick Brakeman. The drumline is overcoming these obstacles as they always have; with rigorous practices.

“It’s more than just a drumline or a school activity for us. Each and every one of us put more time into it this year than anything else. After a while, we became more like a family and less like a drumline. It demands an immense amount of time input. Most people don’t realize we literally practiced every day during marching season,” junior Austin Bench said.

“The drumline’s show theme and name is Distinctly One. This is derived from the Latin phrase found on coins, “e pluribus unum” which translates to, “From many, one.”

“This is more of a principal theme as opposed to a musical one, but it can be applied to music. In our show we have many examples of solo voices and ensemble voices, as well as members physically being alone and then joined together with the rest of us. If you are able to watch our show, you may want to pay closer attention to the cymbals to carry the theme,” Aaron said.

This unification is exceedingly important to another key role in drumline which is synergy. Drumline is a “pageantry” or visual sport, requiring every element to be extremely fine-tuned and rehearsed.

“Unlike normal sports teams, we don’t have ‘games’ in which we have 1 – 2 hours to perform and try to beat the other team. We have five minutes to perform once. Literally everything you memorize and rehearse is rehearsed for one time. If you miss it during your performance, it’s gone. The points are docked. You don’t ‘gain’ points, you ‘lose’ them. Instead of starting at zero and then moving up, we start at 100 and move down. In football, you could fumble the ball three times in the first half, but in the second half, assuming you didn’t get benched, you could score four touchdowns. At the end of the game you’d be a key player. But with what we do, there is no scoring to earn points, there are no ‘key players’ that can lead the team to victory. The only thing that counts is not screwing up. If you drop a note there is no way to ‘make up for it’ other than not doing it again. That’s an immense amount of pressure,” Aaron said.

However, the drumline eagerly dives into this pressure, backed by their love of the activity.

“Our theme is unity; it’s better to be a family than it is to be a single person,” Bench said.