While players on the Milton High School football team are practicing for the upcoming season, so are members of the school’s Mighty Black and Gold Band. This week the school’s band staff along with leadership students are giving incoming freshmen students an introduction to the basics of playing in a marching band at the school’s practice field.
Click here: To view photos from the practice
Assistant Band Director Michael Schultz said around 70 freshmen student will learn such fundamentals like breathing exercises, standing to attention, line formations and more.
“This right here is the nuts and bolts of what we do in order to get the rookies integrated with us,” he said.
Schultz said the overall number of MHS band students continues to grow.
“Total our band is going to be about 210 this year, which is the biggest band Milton High School has ever had,” Schultz said. “For the past four years, we have broken that record every year.”
This past school year, Milton had 185 students in the band program.
This week’s freshmen practice will conclude on Thursday. The freshmen will get a couple of weeks rest before the main summer band camp begins, Schultz said.
“After this week, we are off for about three weeks and then we have our actual band camp which is the last two weeks of July and will go from 8 a.m. to 9:30 p.m.,” he said. “We do three-a-days for two weeks and that is when we put our show on the field and get the year going.”
This article originally appeared on Santa Rosa Press Gazette: Seen on Scene: The Mighty Black and Gold Band integrates freshmen class with practice (PHOTOS)