STEPPING OUT

High-school band contests turn marching into a sport—and an art.

- BURKHARD BILGER

Hell Week had come for the Marching Colonels.

It was late July in eastern Kentucky, and a hazy sun hung over Bourbon County High School. In the parking lot behind the band room, the asphalt was hot enough to melt chewing gum. The woodwinds were gathered there in a ragged circle, waiting for the metronome to set the tempo, while the trumpets and trombones stumbled around on the football field below. Inside the school, the leader of the drum line, a knobby fifteenyear-old named Jacob Guy, scowled at the boys slouched in front of him, thin necks bent over bulky instruments. "I'm not getting any effort from anyone right now," he said. "We've been over this.

Count out loud! If someone isn't marking time, it's five pushups!" The band had been at this since eightthirty in the morning. First half an hour of stretching and calisthenics, then marching practice, and now sectional and full-band rehearsals. If they were lucky, they'd get home by six, slather their muscles with Icy Hot, and do the same thing again the next day. All told, they would rehearse close to fifty hours that week, then two to three hours a day for the rest of the summer and fourteen hours a week in the fall. When I asked Grayson Mack, the lead marimba player, if all that practice was hard on his body, he held up his hands. The fingers and palms were wrapped in black athletic tape to cover blisters. "The mallets rub up against them," he said. "And I have tendinitis and carpal tunnel in both arms.