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The Pipestone Area Marching Arrows finished fifth out of 9 bands in Class 2A at the Dutchmen Field Championships in Orange City, Iowa on Saturday, Oct. 11. The band will perform Saturday, Oct. 18 at the Quad States Regional Championships at the DakotaDome in Vermillion, which will be its final competition of the season. Contributed photo
The Pipestone Area Marching Arrows finished fifth out of nine bands in Class 2A and 19th out of 26 bands overall Saturday, Oct. 11 at the Dutchmen Field Championship in Orange City, Iowa.
Drum Major Sefora Gamboa Herrera, the lone senior on the band, said she was proud of the young band and that she thought it was one of the band’s strongest performances of the year.
“I feel as though the band was definitely very hyped up,” she said. “They had a lot of energy and I just felt like the energy before was way better than any of our other competitions we’ve gone to so far.”
Director Zach Ploeger highlighted the percussion section, which ranked 12th out of 26 bands overall. He said the percussion section has made significant strides since last year when the band as a whole typically outranked the percussion section.
“They’ve been outperforming us by a little bit all season, but they really jumped up there this time and that’s great,” Ploeger said. “We’re happy to see that. That’s what comes from actually putting the resources behind having weekly percussion lessons in the schools and having that marching band staff in the summer.”
None of the percussion students are seniors and Ploeger said half of them are in middle school, so he’s hoping they will keep improving and becoming even more competitive in years to come.
The band also did well in the visual individual category, ranking 10th out of 26 bands overall, and the music individual category in which it ranked 16th out of 26. The ensemble scores in those categories were not quite as strong and Ploeger said that’s likely a result of having so many young band members.
“We really felt at the end of it that everybody was doing their best and contributing and that we got the best out of them in that moment, and that’s really all you can ask for,” he said.
One area Ploeger said has struggled this year is the color guard. He said there were six members at the start of the season and some have left the band and had medical issues during the season, which has caused challenges. He said he’d like to recruit more members to the color guard in the future and find a teacher to work with the group regularly to build up that element of the marching band.
As the band prepares for its final competition of the season on Saturday, Oct. 18 at the Quad States Regional Championships at the DakotaDome in Vermillion, Ploeger said the goal will be to clean up marching and execution.
“At this point, we’ve got mostly all of them in step,” he said. “It’s mostly what we call phasing where they’re basically on the right foot, but it’s a little bit delayed or ahead of where the actual pulse is, so instead of it hitting immediately together, it’s a fraction of a second early or late, which you can still see.”
The Arrows will be one of two bands in Class II/A in Vermillion and are expected to take the field at 10:15 a.m.
In addition to being the final competition of the season, it’s also the final competition of Gamboa Herrera’s high school marching band career.
“It makes me very sad,” she said. “I’m going to miss them all so much.”