Ken Johnson, assistant band director, leads the Carroll High School Wind Ensemble and Dawson Middle School eighth grade band
With a score of 83.6, the Southlake Carroll Band placed ninth out of 14 bands that made the finals round in the Bands of America Super Regional Championship last weekend, which was the first national competition they participated in.
“It felt fantastic,” Ken Johnson, the director of bands for Carroll ISD says. “It was exciting, thrilling to watch the reaction of the students. I felt great for them and for our Dragon family and certainly for our alumni too, who helped lay the foundation [of] getting to that point.”
The band started preparing for this competition in late July and early August, getting the music together and beginning the drills.
“This particular show had a lot of high demand in that not only are you doing marching drills — going from one spot to the next — and then trying to play some challenging music, it also was unique in that it had a lot of choreography,” Johnson says. “We felt like the show was very organic in that from one spot to the next, we had students doing all sorts of body movements.”
With 225 students competing as the Carroll Band, Johnson says that the bodywork and dance movements the students did posed “a whole new challenge and a level of maturity, if you will, that we had never attempted before with the Dragon Band.”
Johnson says the band was a little nervous before the competition, even if they didn’t admit it.
“Going into the Dome of America and walking out onto that field, that was their first performance in a stadium of that magnitude,” Johnson says. “Just knowing that they were surrounded by so many great bands and such a huge audience, they were probably a little nervous. I was nervous for them, that’s for sure.”
The band performed the same show, titled “Nomadic,” for every stage of the competition.
“We received judges’ comments and tapes right after the first performance,” Johnson says. “So our job as a band staff is to review those tapes for things that the judges liked or didn’t like and between the preliminary performance and finals performance, we’re already trying to make adjustments.”
The Southlake Carroll Band was one of the last to perform in the preliminary round on Saturday morning and it was around 4 p.m. that they made the finals round, Johnson says. Their finals performance took place at 8:30 Saturday evening.
While this contest marks the end of their competition season, Johnson says they already are thinking of next year.
“It was a great high to end with,” Johnson says. “So we’re done with our competition season but now we begin our preparations [in] looking towards next year.”
Johnson says they have an idea of what they would like to do next year.
“We’re actually going to start the design process here in the next week or so,” he says. “So we can already get a head start for where we want to be for this next year.”
And while the Southlake Carroll Band hasn’t officially celebrated its performance at this competition, Johnson says that’s coming up.
“I think it’s been so crazy from the time we got back. We got back on Sunday afternoon and the kids went right back to school. We haven’t really had a chance to do anything along those lines,” he says. “We are going to make some special announcements at the upcoming football game.”
Johnson also says they’re planning to do an encore performance of their show on Senior Night next week.
“Not only are we proud of the current Dragon Band and the students who helped make this season successful but also a huge shout out and I’m so proud of the alumni from the recent years,” Johnson says. “Because they helped lay the foundation. They believed in what we were doing and they knew it was going to take several years to get to this level and I know that they’re really proud also.”