The Daviess County Band of Pride hosted their first indoor performance Saturday at the high school. Groups from across Kentucky and Tennessee performed for hundreds of spectators at the event, which is a part of the Southeastern Color Guard Circuit (SCGC), which is the regional body of Arts in the South.
Karen Alward, band director at DCHS, said 33 schools and more than 700 students were competing in color guard, percussion and wind ensemble.
“Our band community is proud to welcome the indoor marching arts to Owensboro, Kentucky,” she said. “This event is a big deal because in Kentucky we don’t have as many indoor groups as our competing states.”
She said getting teams to travel to Owensboro not only helped the DCHS band but also smaller groups from western Kentucky. Since performances are often four to five hours away from the schools, they don’t get to compete as often.
“It’s really cool because we have groups here today who can’t travel really far and this is a local show for them,” Alward said. “Even though they had to travel, it’s only a couple hours, compared to some of their longer trips. Some schools are even bringing their middle school kids. It does my heart good to see these young performers have an opportunity to get in front of a good sized audience.”
Alward said the performance is good off-season training. Hosting the show also helps the DCHS band since it acts as a fundraiser for the group.
“We normally travel, so this is a big deal to host this show,” she said. “If we do a good job today, we hope we can host again in the future.”
The mission of the SCGC is to foster positive experiences for all who participate by promoting education, creativity and freedom of expression through the unification of pageantry and the performing arts. Even with 40 years of history, the sport continues to evolve and grow.
Hussan Malik, a senior at DCHS who plays the snare drum, has been in band for four years and said he was happy with the group’s performance Saturday.
“I thought our performance went great,” he said. “We put in so much work for this show and I’m proud of everyone. We worked so hard on this show and the friendships I’ve made in band are more like family.”
Jenna Duckwall, a sophomore band member at DCHS, said the indoor competition was fun, more importantly she said she made some great memories.
“We always want to have fun, we want to win, but we want to have fun while doing it,” she said. “Medals don’t matter to us, we want the memories — those we will always have with us.”
