On October 22, 2021, the final home football game, Senior Night, took place. This specific game recognizes all of the senior football players, but as a part of the band, we have our own ways of doing things on Senior Night, and it’s not just from performing at halftime.

Our call times to arrive in order to get ready ranged from 5-5:30 pm depending on the instruments you played. We then gathered into our practice field to rehearse our halftime show. During this, the band moms started going around and pinning ribbons onto the senior students’ uniforms. After running the show about two or three times, we started to head down to the football field, where we’d kick off the game with the school’s fight song, “Bite On”. Once we finished that, we would stand as the choir performed the national anthem (or in the case of some kids who were in both, head over there as soon as we finished the fight song) before heading into the stands to play a few tunes when there were breaks in between plays. A few of the tunes that we played consisted of a shortened version of the fight song, a shortened (and longer version of) “The Magnificent Seven”, “Seven-Nation Army”, “Iron Man”, and music from The Mandalorian, to name a few.

About 4-5 minutes into the second quarter, we started heading out of the stands and onto the side of the field, where we warmed up our instruments and tuned in preparation for the halftime show. As we stepped off for halftime to begin, the announcer starts listing off names in acknowledgment of all of the seniors in the band (which was rather extensive, as there were a good 60+ of us in the band). For some, this would be their final halftime performance for the year, but for others, this would be our final performance at Santiago. We did our best throughout the show and played our two tunes, “Soak Up The Sun” and “You Are The Sunshine Of My Life”, before stepping off of the field and back up to the practice field to take a break from playing while we ate hot dogs and Rice Krispie Treats. Here, seniors were given the opportunity to take pictures with their families before a small ceremony was held as the band moms started handing out gift bags and candy necklaces to the seniors before letting us get our pictures taken with the band directors. The candy necklaces were different per person, yet the gift bags consisted of similar items: shark-themed accessories, gift cards, a t-shirt, stickers, and other sorts of treats.

We returned in time to watch the latter portion of the third quarter and the full fourth quarter. During this time, the football team had started to score more, resulting in more opportunities to play the full fight song from the stands. On top of that, we also played “Sweet Caroline”, “Mission Impossible”, “Mars”, and a few tunes that we’d played in the first two quarters.

In the end, Santiago ended up winning with a score of 69-34, which was good to see. We concluded our performance at the football game with another round of the fight song as well as our alma mater, “Lead Us Boldly”, before packing up and leaving. A majority of the band went over to celebrate at Graziano’s Pizza, as per usual, before heading home after a long, celebratory, and emotional night.