BYU's pep band has been missing from basketball games. More than 5,000 people have signed an online petition to bring back the band.
When BYU pep band members went to set up their instruments in the Marriott Center to play at a recentgame, as student-musicians had heretofore done for decades, they were told to pack back up and leave, told there were no seats for them because someone in authority at the school decided — for some yet untold reason — that the band’s sounds and services were no longer needed.
Those sourpusses are just flat wrong, other than maybe the deal about having had their fill of “Copa Cabana.” Pep and marching bands play a significant role in contributing to what is the essence, the tradition of the college sports experience. It’s not the same, the only exception being what Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls teams did in their intro — and what other NBA teams copied — with “Sirius” by the Alan Parsons Project. Now that was fantastic stuff. Still can’t hear those guitar chords without thinking of sitting in the United Center for Bulls playoff games. Whoever said sports and music don’t mix unfortunately never had ears to hear that song pumping in at those games.
For an off-beat column, I once sat at an NCAA Tournament game between UConn and Tennessee-Chattanooga with the 29-member pep bands, switching from the Husky band to the Moccasins group at the half. I’ll never forget that experience, how amped up those students were from start to finish and the effects they tried to have on their teams inside the Huntsman Center.
A trumpet player told me between songs: “We just blow our lips off to support the team. We blow until our faces turn blue. We get so into it that after the game we go back to the hotel room and pass out on the bed.”
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