Marching to victory

Westbrook competes where others fear to tread

By Sam Pfeifle

Of the wonderful sports out there not getting much by way of coverage — bowling, darts, billiards, disc golf, roller hockey — there is one among them far more legitimate, yet receiving even less coverage. It is a sport requiring precision, stamina, strengýh, and teamwork, with a thriving national circuit to match. Guessed it yet? I’m talking about marching-band competitions, where as many as 100 student athletes/musicians per band come together to excite the crowd, impress the judges, and crush the opposition.

If you’re looking for the cream of the crop, look no further than Westbrook High School, where George Bookataub leads a band and color guard that placed third in their division at last year’s nationals and is currently gearing up for a run at this year’s New England and National titles.

Perhaps what makes them most remarkable is that they’ve continued to achieve at ever higher levels without the benefit of any homegrown competition. It’s not necessarily that there aren’t any bands of their caliber in Maine (well, there aren’t), it’s that Maine has decided to effectively take the competition out of the state, switching three years ago from the universally used 100-point scoring system to a system whereby bands perform and then are awarded up to five stars. Yep, they get stars. That’s like eliminating touchdowns and field goals from football and telling the players afterward, as they nurse their aching bodies, “hey, you guys sure looked swell out there.”

But Bookataub and his marchers were undaunted. Preferring to keep their competitive edge, they dropped out of the Maine circuit and have taken their show on the road, competing against teams from Massachusetts and beyond, and hosting teams from out of state on their home field.

“I made the decision to drop out of that [star] system and stay with the competitive system,” says Bookataub. “If you’re going to ask kids to put in all that time and effort, they have a right to know where they stand and stack up against other bands.”

They definitely put in plenty of time and energy. Before each season, band members go to band camp — which is a lot tougher than it sounds. Members practice from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., five days a week, for two weeks straight. “That would be like a football team going to four-a-days,” notes Bookataub. There they are rigorously trained in the fundamentals of musicianship, are instructed on how to perform the season’s production (this year, it’s “The Planets,” specifically Mars, Venus, and Jupiter, by Gustav Holtz), and are given their dot books, the equivalent to a football player’s playbook. In the dot book are each of the “sets” the marchers need to know, basically how they get from point A on the field to point B, and how many steps (or beats) it should take.

There’s little room for error. “If it takes 16 steps, we tell the kids, it takes 16 steps. That doesn’t mean 15 steps and that doesn’t mean 17 steps. It means 16 steps, and they have to understand that.” Bookataub is as unforgiving as any football coach. And his handicapping of their competition sounds every bit like a pro coach giving an interview to Al Michaels: The school to watch out for at the New England Championships “is Dartmouth High School, out of Dartmouth, Massachusetts. They beat us this weekend, but we’re only about two points behind them, and that’s close. We have work to do. We know what we have to do, but, realistically, and I don’t believe in telling the kids anything but the truth, we can beat ’em. If we can come in second, that’s a real accomplishment for us, but this band has the ability to win it all, so the onus goes back to them.”

Those championships take place next weekend, November 2, down in Peabody, Massachusetts. But this weekend, Westbrook will be prepping for the USSBA National Championships by traveling down to East Lime, Connecticut, then over to the Coast Guard Academy in Groton. “We’ve sort of got a double header this weekend,” says Bookataub. What he wants to know is whether the kids are ready for big-time competition. They’ve been steadily improving their score all year, and this past weekend scored a 92.3, so Bookataub thinks they’re ready, but you can never be sure.

“Our score will matter for us this weekend,” he says. “Because of our score from last year, we’re already in the finals for the nationals, but we need to see how we stack up. We won’t know until we see how we do in these next two weeks. I’ve been going all over the Internet and there are some bands out there putting up some really good scores. We’re hanging in there. We’re right in the top ten percent, I’d say.”

They’ll find out for sure when they travel down to Allentown, Pennsylvania, for the championships in four weeks. Which is another reason why this is a tough sport. Imagine having to move 100 kids all over New England, and sometimes further, every weekend.

Booster club member Jane Cote remembers taking the kids down to Disney World a few years ago so they could march in a parade. “We took a bus,” she says, “because we were worried about Y2K. And a flu bug went right through the band. We were driving the whole way down with the windows wide open.” Yes, indeed, it sounds like grueling sport.

Sam Pfeifle can be reached at spfeifle@phx.com. “Game On” tackles all manner of marginal sports and runs once a month.