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Red Devil Band

This years Competition Schedule

Sept. 22 Exhibition performance at Andrew Jackson

Oct. 6 Wilbur F. Smith Invitational at Union County Fairgrounds Stadium

Oct. 20 Upperstate Competition @ Woodmont High School, in Piedmont, SC

Oct. 27 State Competition @ Clinton, SC

'Little big' man leads GFHS band

Check out Jones as he shows the crowd "what he's got" at Friday's football game.

By Travis Jenkins tjenkins@onlinechester.com

Depending on whom you ask then, the band either has a precocious little brother or is really young at quarterback. Seventh-grader Jacob Jones is the drum major of the Great Falls marching band. Jones only recently turned 12.

“It’s awesome to be the drum major my first year,” Jacob said. “It’s a lot of hard work. The songs we’re doing are hard, but it’s my job to keep everybody ready.”

The songs in this year’s show are quite a bit older than Jacob, or even band director Jason Jones. The Red Devils are performing four hits by the band Chicago, including “Make Me Smile”, “Saturday in the Park”, “You’re the Inspiration” and “25 or 6 to 4.”

“Surprisingly, most of the kids were at least familiar with the songs,” Jason Jones said. “Other than ‘You’re the Inspiration’, they didn’t know Chicago did them, but they had heard them before.”

If the band is as close as kin, then the family tree has a lot of branches, twisting in all directions. Jacob’s dad Jayson teaches Jason Jones’ son at Great Falls elementary. Jayson’s step-son is also in the band and Jayson himself was a member of the Great Falls band in the early 1980s. His band director was Gaither Bumgardner, whose son is now the quarterback of the Great Falls football team.

Jacob has certainly got support from his real family. Though his dad was not a drum major himself (he played the tuba) he did go through drum major training. That has allowed him to help Jacob along.

“It was pretty tough for him at first,” Jayson Jones said. “The first day or two I didn’t think he was going to stick with it. There were a lot of tears, but we kept working on it and he’s steadily improved.”

Jason Jones said he appreciated the help, since it kept him from having to teach somebody brand new the nuances of being a drum major.

Looked at through his prism of the band being like a football team, Jacob gets the attention of an offensive skill player. For a back to shine, though, he needs help from the rest of his team. The other 22 members of the band are just as important. Henson, who has been marching for five years, said the continuity that Jason Jones has provided has helped the band improve.

“We’ve had the same people for about three years,” said Henson. “We’ve grown and gotten better.”

Henson said that having the same director for the past three years has been a key to the band’s success.

Alex Walters, a senior trumpet player with six years of marching experience, found another parallel between the band and the team with whom they share a field.

“We practice as hard as we can,” Walters said.

When the band goes to its first competition on Sept. 22 at Andrew Jackson High, he said he and the rest of the band would “give it their all.”

The band features a solid defense this year, that is to say it's got several guys who can really hit. The band has a drum line marching with them for the first time “since the late ’80s or early ’90s” according to Walter’s estimation.

“We’ve had drummers but they haven’t marched,” Jason Jones said. “It adds more of a sense of rhythm to the show. It decreases the sound delay and just brings a greater sense of unity.”

Like any other team, there are a lot of backers that don’t always get attention for their contributions. Amber Bruce is the band’s secretary, Megan Hinson is the color guard captain, Cathy Henely is the Booster Club President, Donna Walters the vice-president and Amy Hinson the secretary and vice-president. Even Gene’s Restaurant has pitched in, giving the band warmers that will allow them to sell pizza at ball games.

Like a family or a football team, a lot of attention is being paid to the next generation. Though several members of the band have been around for awhile, the majority of the group is made up of young players. Jason Jones said the biggest growth he has seen is at the middle school level, which gives him a lot of hope for the future while keeping him optimistic about the present.

That present, of course, includes a drum major who gets a lot of attention for being young and a little on the small side. Jacob doesn’t mind. He said getting a big ovation from a crowd helps calm his nerves and gets him focused. Before the band’s first performance of the year when Great Falls played Nation Ford, Jacob's preacher said a quick prayer with him on the sidelines as a way to offer a little extra support.

The band director doesn’t mind his “little big man” (one of the names given him by Great Falls’ PA man) getting attention, so long as people get past the novelty of his age and realize that Jacob works hard and is good at what he does. He hopes folks notice the hard work everyone else does too.

The band started a tradition last year, one that Jason Jones said helps quell everyone’s jitters. What the group does for stress relief should come as no surprise.

“We get there a little early,” Jason Jones said. “That gives us time to throw around a football for a little while.”

Letters to the Editor and Citizen Comments

TO THE EDITOR: LHS band mom loved GF band story

Hey. Just wanted to say it was really nice to see a GREAT story on one of the high school marching bands in Chester County. I loved the story.

Being a former high school band member and having a daughter now in Lewisville’s marching band you see first hand how hard it is. To them, they do practice and perform as much and even more as any athlete on the playing field but most of the time they get no story in the paper or weekly recognition and the community is unaware of what hard work, commitment and dedication it takes to be a band member.

So once again THANKS for giving a little glimpse of what a band is all about. Please continue to cover all the bands in the county -- they all have a story to tell and I am sure a captive audience that would love to listen and be proud of all Chester County’ bands

Go Lewisville Marching Lions!

Sharon Roof

Edgemoor

Get on the internet for added content

We put a video of the Great Falls Marching band and its drum major up on our website, OnlineChester.com, on Tuesday. According to tracking software, 242 people have watched the four-minute video.

We put up a video of highlights from the Great Falls-Lewisville football game on Saturday — 226 people watched it.

There’s football action with that game video and other football previews. There’s music online with that band video — we also put up a video of a gospel band playing at the Uriel Presbyterian barbecue on Labor Day.

There’s a lot going on at OnlineChester.com. Things that allow us to offer you more and for us to have a little fun in the process.

Video is one new thing we’ve been doing.

We prepare our videos on a high quality web setting so that it looks decent on your screen. We had a call from a mother who saw our Great Falls football preview video. On it, her son made a tackle. She wanted it. We could have given her the Internet video on a CD and she could crowd her family around the computer to watch it, as big as a baseball card.

But we can also take that video and use better settings. We’ve made her a DVD she can play on her TV. On it, we also included the Chester and Lewisville high school football previews. We have to charge for the material and time it takes to produce it. She told us how much she was willing to pay. She’s getting a bargain. If you want it too, let us know.

By the way, we heard the Great Falls band members crowded around a computer the other day to watch the band video.

We have just one thing to say. STOP IT! Go home or to class and watch it on an individual computer. We need the hits.

We’re joking. If you look at the letters’ column, not just the band likes that video.

Our company, Landmark Community News-papers Inc., has 64 newspapers online through a company called TownNews.com.

TownNews updated its stats system in late June, as we said. We are able to track things a bit closer. We are also able to compare ourselves to other papers in our company. There are a few big dailies in the mix, and many bigger papers, including our sister paper, The Lancaster News.

We rank 16 out of 64 papers in “visitors” to our site since June. That’s in the top 25 percent. Top fourth. Lancaster is 10.

We’ve had 120,169 visitors in just under three months. That’s 40,000 visitors a month.

We can now list our most read stories and most commented stories for comments. It only goes back 30 days, so it changes every day.

The site is read more on Wednesdays and Fridays, the day the print paper comes out. Readers are correct to hit those days, because we always have new content, from our print edition, on those days. But we break news and sports news throughout the week online.

There’s a lot going on at OnlineChester.com. Every single day. If you haven’t been there, you ain’t heard — and seen — nothing yet.

Marching to the beat of a younger drummer

Middle schoolers' smaller feet step up in Great Falls High School band

By Charles D. Perry · cperry@heraldonline.com

Updated 09/17/07 - 9:18 AM

That estimate would be more believable if he was wearing boots in a monsoon.

While his size is debatable, there was no doubt whose voice guided the Red Devils' band at a recent practice.

"I tell 'em where they're supposed to be," said 12-year-old Jacob "J.J." Jones, the half-pint drum major in the pink shirt that said, "Tough Guys Wear Pink."

Tough guys also shrug off stupid questions about their age and size. J.J. means business, and he doesn't worry about the novelty of someone his age holding a position typically manned by seniors and juniors.

"I'm 12 years old, and I'm able to do stuff that people way older than me can do," he said confidently.

Other than his leading job, J.J.'s participation in the band isn't strange in a county where middle-schoolers often march in high school bands.

Nearly half the Great Falls High School band is enrolled in seventh or eighth grade. At Lewisville High and even larger Chester High, middle-schoolers make up about a third of the band.

"It's not unusual for that to happen," said Martin Dickey, president of the S.C. Band Directors Association and director of Nation Ford High School's band in Fort Mill.

At larger schools, Dickey said, block scheduling has reduced the size of the bands. At smaller schools, that same issue has forced directors to pull students from middle school.

Marcus Morris is in his first year as Chester High School's band director. As he tries to build a program, he marches middle-schoolers.

Morris hopes to eventually move away from that practice, but he's got to start somewhere.

"When you try to grow, you try to recruit young," he said. "If you can get those younger ones rocking and rolling, you'll be able to kind of get them where you need them to be."

The Lewisville High School band is smaller this year in part because of students who moved away or graduated, said director Daniel Nuckolls. Last year's group, which came a point shy of a state championship, included more upperclassmen.

Every few years, turnover requires a band to recruit younger students, Nuckolls said.

"Our band definitely got shorter this year," he said. But he noted that there is an upside to marching youthful members.

"If they weren't in marching band," he said, "they wouldn't have grown as fast because of the amount of practice time and the amount of demand on them with the older kids."

Band directors at all three schools hope their younger students will develop into mature, harmonious units.

Jason Jones, in his third year as Great Falls' band director, hopes to see his squad grow from 24 members to 60 or 70 in coming years, marching only high school students.

"We do what we can with what we've got," he said.

Jones, who is not related to J.J., didn't set out to install a 12-year-old as his drum major. But there were six drummers and five drums. One drummer was J.J., whose dad played the tuba at Great Falls High and knew the demands of the drum major's position. Hours of fatherly teaching has paid off.

During that recent practice, the young band director sat in the stands of Great Falls' football stadium and relayed instructions to his very young drum major on the field.

J.J. was trying to lead the band in the steps to "Make Me Smile," one of four Chicago songs the band hopes to master this season.

"Really good job," Jones' said of J.J.'s efforts as drum major. "There are still some minor things he can work on here and there."

But do the other kids respect him?

"They go with it," Jones said.

For J.J., respect didn't come immediately. He had to prove himself, and when his peers didn't listen, he had the authority to make them run laps or perform push ups.

"They're like, 'I don't want to run laps,'" he said of a few encounters with uncooperative bandmates. "I'm like, 'Well, you're gonna have to.'"

Once everyone realized he wasn't kidding, J.J. said, then they began to respect him.

Band members say respect isn't an issue with their small leader.

"He's my drum major," said Amber Bruce, a 14-year-old freshman flute player. "I'm going to respect him whether he's 12 or 17."

Even senior band captain and trumpet player Alex Walters is willing to let his cousin, J.J., be the field general.

"I'm kind of like his right hand," said Walters, who technically has the band's top leadership role. "I give power to him. I think it's very rare (that) you see a 12-year-old as a drum major. ... I'm going to respect him, no matter the age."