U.S. Bank Stadium will trade football for marching bands on Saturday as the 2023 Youth in Music Marching Band Championships bring high school marching bands from across Minnesota and the Midwest to downtown Minneapolis.
"There's 36 high school marching bands and two college marching bands that will perform throughout the day, so we have a lot of bands," said Youth in Music president Brent Turner. "They will start rolling into US Bank Stadium at about 5:15 in the morning. We're on campus about 3:30 a.m. and will get done at about 10:30 p.m. with staff out of there by 11:30 p.m. It's a great day of performances and celebrating that talent of our high school students and marching bands in the upper Midwest region."
There are four separate classes that bands compete in ranging from A, AA, AAA, and AAAA. Minnesota-based marching bands will compete for state championships in their respective classes.
Class A is mostly filled with beginner bands and very small bands. Class AA is filled with a little bit larger or more developed bands, followed by even larger and more developed bands in AAA and AAAA.
"We take a little bit of a different approach to this than other areas," Turner said. "A lot of states determine classes by school size or band size. We feel like that is a disservice to the bands because there are some large bands that are brand new that really haven't developed and can't really compete with those larger bands. There's smaller bands on the other side of it that can do a lot of items and be very competitive with larger bands. We like to take an educational approach to placing bands in their classes."
Irondale High School is among the schools taking part in Saturday's championships. The Marching Knights currently have 140 students in the marching program, making it one of the largest marching bands the school has seen in years.
"The marching band only had 68 students coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic and I think like a lot of activities, we saw a decrease in participation," said CJ Longabaugh, Director of Bands at Irondale High School. "Coming out of that we've had a lot of students get excited about it. We had a lot of students in the concert program who were becoming more interested in what we are doing."
The Marching Knights are in their final week of practice as the championships on Saturday mark the end of their marching season. The band is going through rehearsals and will have their "dress rehearsal" during halftime of the Irondale football game on Friday night.
"On Saturday the students arrive early in the morning, we do some stretching, we do some rehearsing together, and we have a tradition called 'Inspiration' where seniors talk to other band members about what marching band has meant to them, why they're glad they did this, and the skills they'll take with them into the real world."
Bands will perform a variety of themed shows on Saturday including a cowboy show, dark theatrical shows, and even Viking-themed shows.
"There's just a lot of bands coming in so it becomes logistical with us in downtown," Turner said. "It's a large footprint down there, even though they've done the Super Bowl and those things. The footprint is quite challenging for all of the bands coming down here because most come with three or four buses and two equipment vehicles. The fans will get to see that too as they're coming into U.S. Bank Stadium."
Performing at an NFL stadium takes a lot of careful preparation for marching bands that are used to smaller high school football fields and facilities. Longabaugh says the NFL fields have a different look to them due to different hashmarks and yard number placements.
"We use that information in our season so kids know where to march. When that information is different, we actually have a grass field that we paint with the NFL numbers and hashes so we can teach the kids how to read and use those hashes," he said. "Having the giant Vikings logo on the 50 is a different feeling. We prepare the kids that visually, it's going to look a lot different and that the judges are going to be a lot higher up than they're used to."
U.S. Bank Stadium also presents another challenge for the musicians.
"It can be tricky for individuals to hear each other. Because there's so much echo, you can't trust what you hear on the field. We train our students to watch the drum majors who are our on-field conductors at the front of the field on the podium. We actually do a trick where we have our students wear earplugs so they can get the feeling that the person next to them might not be playing. We try to replicate that."
Tickets for Saturday's Youth in Music Marching Band Championships are on sale with general admission prices at $36 for session I and $35 for session II.
Ticket prices increase for reserved seating options.
The day gets going with the National Anthem at 7 a.m. followed by Osseo High School taking the field at 7:15.
