SC high school marching band championships sidelined this season by COVID-19 concerns
There will be no high school marching band championships in South Carolina this year.
The South Carolina Band Directors Association informed its members throughout the state Friday morning that the 2020 upper state, lower state and state championship contests will not be held due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The decision was made now, in part, so that directors would know before pushing forward and planning their competitive shows.
“We wanted our directors to be able to make decisions on what their marching band seasons were going to look like. If their competitive season depended on SCBDA happening, they may take another direction,” SCBDA President Chaz Paxton said.
“We just felt like with the information that we have right now and what things look like and the predictions that DHEC are coming out with, we just felt like we needed to make a decision now before school starts.”
It is unknown if there will be other marching band contests in the state this fall. Those decisions will be made by individual schools and school districts, not by a committee.
Contests typically begin in late September and continue on throughout the fall, culminating with the state finals. Paxton cautioned that schools will have important decisions to make in regards to following through with their own contests, if any schools opt to do so.
““There are a couple of things they’re going to have to take into consideration — No. 1 is their district policy on allowing those events to happen, and No. 2 is, how many bands are going to be competitive and come to their events and make them profitable for them,” said Paxton, who is also the band director at D.W. Daniel High.
The 1A, 2A, 3A and 4A upper state and lower state contests were scheduled for Oct. 24, with those state finals to be held Oct. 31. The 5A prelims and state finals would have taken place Nov. 7 at Irmo High.
The contests typically involve about 10,000 students performing, with 20,000 to 25,000 spectators in attendance, according to Paxton.
“The main emphasis was the safety of students, the safety of directors and the safety of spectators. We didn’t feel like we could move forward with those events while mitigating all of the risk that could potentially be involved with hosting those events,” Paxton said. “They’re pretty massive events, and for us to be able to put those events on it takes a lot of planning.”
Last year’s state champions were Ninety Six (1A), Pendleton (2A), D.W. Daniel (3A), Nation Ford (4A) and Wando (5A).
Paxton added that it’s possible a spring season could take place, although talks of that are very preliminary at this point. A spring season would likely only occur if the SCHSL moves football to the spring as well.
The SCHSL met earlier this week and put together a plan to have a season this fall. However, it is subject to change.
This story was originally published July 17, 2020 at 12:04 PM.
