By Noah Fraser and Liliana Perales 
8th Grade Student Journalists

--GOBLES--From beginning to end, it was another award-winning marching season for The Gobles High School Marching Band.

The band opened the season of competition in Otsego and took first place, with awards for Best Percussion, Music, Color Guard, and Marching. The band concluded the season in Jenison and again won first place overall, with several more caption awards. The band also won awards in Hastings and Lakeshore, and at the Marching Festival held in Paw Paw.

This year Gobles is performing Carmina Burana, music composed by Carl Orff. According to Gobles Band Director Emily Cox the piece is powerful and harder to march than any other piece that the band in has performed in some time, and she is proud of what she saw from her students this year.

“I am really excited and proud of our band,” Cox said. “We were bigger than ever and we had to work harder to improve than in other years because of the difficulty of our marching show.”

Senior band member and co-leader of the percussion section, Tucker Harbaugh, said the success they’ve had comes from a combination of hard work, tradition, and leadership.

According to Harbaugh, the drum line has a reputation to uphold.

“When I started in drum line in 8th grade, the band took almost every award in every competition,” Harbaugh said. “After the seniors left that year, we had to rebuild to where we are today. We have strong leaders and a great music teacher in Ms. Cox. She is funny, sets high standards, and cares about our success as musicians.”

“The drum line hasn’t taken anything but first place my entire time in the band,” Harbaugh said. “We practice a lot. I was born into being a percussionist because my dad was a percussionist, too. It was fantastic to go through my band years undefeated as a drum line. We leave a proud tradition behind us, and everyone has high expectations for what we put on the field.”

Once again the band features students in grades eight through twelve, and the 8th graders now take up the tradition of excellence established over the years by the Gobles band.

Last fall Brian Hayward was a featured performer both during Gobles football games and then again at halftime with the marching band. Hayward was running back and linebacker for the SAC North Division Conference Co-Champs, and one of two senior trumpet players in the award-winning high school marching band; both head football coach Jim Wiseley and band director Emily Cox proudly featured Hayward's talent every Friday night for the Gobles Tigers.

This fall his talent is still on display on the football field, but now it's in front of 110,000 fans in Ann Arbor as a member of the University of Michigan Marching Band. Brian earned the fourth-chair spot with the Marching Wolverines, meaning he is the fourth-best trumpet in a band with a total of nearly seventy trumpets, a rare feat for a college freshman in one of the premier college marching bands in the country.

Hayward has been busy since starting college this fall at U of M, but will make time to return to Gobles early this football and marching season to work with the band and to cheer his team to victory, or perhaps Hail the Victors Valiant, during a home football game on the field where he grew up as an athlete and musician.