Marching madness: Play on!

Byline: Matt Cooper The Register-Guard

Marching bands are the hors d'oeuvres of a football game: a wonderful treat, but never the main course.

Until Saturday, that is.

Twenty-five high school marching bands filed into Autzen Stadium to compete in the 28th annual Oregon Festival of Bands, part of a series that will crown the top high school band in the Northwest next month. The Willamette and Sheldon bands represented Eugene in an event that drew from Oregon, Washington and Idaho.

Forget football: For more than 12 hours Saturday, the only points this crowd wanted to see were for musical and visual performance.

"When you come to a marching band competition, every single person in the stands is there to watch you," said Donnie Kim, 19, student coordinator and vice president of the Oregon Marching Band Council. "It's their chance to show how hard they've worked."

The absence of more than 59,000 Duck-daffy football fans - replaced by a respectful crowd in the hundreds - gave Autzen an eerie stillness. And that's just the way Cailin Thompson likes it.

"At a football game, people are eating, they're talking, some people don't even know we've played," said Thompson, 17, drum major for the Willamette High School Marching Band.

But at a competition, she said, "you can feel it in the air - they're waiting for you to perform. It's so rad that they're there for us."

Like Olympic athletes, high school bands practice long hours for a few scant minutes in the limelight.

The Willamette band practices about two hours a day, Monday through Thursday, for the better part of three months, Thompson said. During competition, they play for 10 minutes.

The Willamette band has competed for almost 20 years. On Saturday, they played Phil Collins' "Turn It On." Given the 50-member band's comparatively small size, band director Bart Ellis was encouraging them to "turn it up."

Ellis likes the fact that, in his band, nobody can hide; everybody must contribute. But big high school bands have more trumpets than he has members - "I can't compete against that sound," Ellis acknowledged.

He doesn't have to, at least not at first. In the early rounds of competition, bands play against others of similar size. For the finals, the top 16 square off.

When the dust settled at last year's Pacific Coast Invitational competition in Salem, the Sheldon High School Marching Band took first place among bands with fewer than 90 members.

That's a point of pride for director Tracy Ross, 33, who noted that Sheldon has the only marching band in the Eugene School District.

Sheldon presented a collection of hits from Paul Simon's partnership with Art Garfunkel and from Simon's solo career - "Bridge Over Troubled Water," "The Sound of Silence," "You Can Call Me Al" and "Late in the Evening."

Saturday's event made it clear that marching band is not for those who need a how-to manual on walking and chewing gun.

Sheldon junior Noah Belcher, 16, listed no fewer than four tasks that must be performed simultaneously during a song: Play off the rhythm of the person next to you, keep one eye on the drum major for timing, keep the other eye on your positioning in the line, and keep your feet marching to the beat.

Oh, yes, and play your instrument expertly, too. For Belcher, that's a snare drum.

"You have to focus," he said. "You have to maintain this idea that everyone is like one person."