There’s something a little different about sitting in the stands at a local marching band competition when you work every day focused on marching band.

For most people, it’s a Saturday filled with music, marching, stadium food, and cheering for some incredibly talented students. For me? It’s all of that…plus analyzing drill like I’ve been personally asked to judge visual. I literally can’t help it.

 

Working for Pyware means spending my weekdays surrounded by marching band. We talk drill, how to manipulate formations, export or print coordinates, matching transitions, custom props and uniforms, and all the tiny details that go into getting a show from a designer’s and director’s imagination onto a football field.

Then the weekend comes…and apparently my hobby is going to watch more marching band. Healthy boundaries are important… to which, I have none.

Sitting at a local competition is also one of my favorite reminders of why what we do matters. And why our customers matter so much to us here at Pyware.

When you work with software every day, it’s easy to see a drill file as exactly that… a file. Sets. Counts. Coordinates. Forms moving across a screen.

Then you sit in the stands and suddenly those little dots are real students. They’re carrying instruments, spinning flags, pushing props, hauling percussion equipment, counting like their lives depend on it.

 

 

 

Meanwhile, sprinting up the 50 yard line staircase is a band director. Possibly holding a megaphone. Possibly holding their breath due to an exhausting week of work ending in a full Saturday of unknown results. They know every single thing that is supposed to happen during the next eight minutes and they WILL notice everything.

Working for Pyware has also completely changed the internal dialogue happening in my head during shows. A beautiful transition starts developing: “Ooooooh. Okay. Where are we going with this?” A form opens perfectly: “YES. Clean.” An arc turns into a block, which turns into three circles… “Beautiful.”

And then there are dramatically tragic moments. A performer starts heading confidently toward what is very clearly NOT their next dot: “Oh no.” They realize it. “OH NO.” They redirect. “RUN, CHILD. RUN.” They make it. I am now emotionally invested in this student’s entire marching career.

Then there are the moments when I start wondering how the drill was actually written. Was that Morph? Copy and paste? Mirror? Did somebody seriously move every dot individually? Because if they did, I have questions.

Of course, there are also marching band moments that have absolutely nothing to do with a drill writing software.

For example, the front ensemble parent moving equipment with the urgency of someone transporting a human organ. The plume that has gone missing despite being in someone’s hand 30 seconds ago. The kid whose shoe comes off mid-show but continues marching because there is absolutely NO PLAN in the coordinate sheet for retrieving a Viper from Side 1.

 

 

And finally, the moments where everything comes together. The music swells. The drill locks. The guard hits. The form opens at exactly the right moment. The crowd reacts and suddenly I’m not thinking about coordinates, transitions, tools, intervals, that prop being in the software or how the drill was written.  Just because Pyware may be one of the tools used to help create what happens on that field, doesn’t mean the software is the show.

The people are. The designers, directors and staff members are. The students who rehearse it over and over…and over…and then one more time because apparently “one more time” is printed somewhere in the Band Director Handbook… are. The parents loading props, hauling equipment, working concessions, sewing uniforms, finding lost gloves, feeding 200 teenagers, and somehow getting an entire marching band from Point A to Point B while carrying a roll of duct tape and six bobby pins…  are.

 

Marching band is this wonderfully chaotic little world where an unbelievable number of people work together for months to create eight to ten minutes of something special. And I get to work for a company that has been part of that world for generations. That’s pretty cool.

So yes, when I’m sitting at a local competition, I’m going to notice the drill. I’m going to wonder which tools the designer used. I’m probably going to mentally fix an interval that nobody asked me to fix. I’m going to root for the kid sprinting toward their coordinate like their life depends on it. I’m going to eat overpriced stadium nachos and a weirdly flat coke. I’m going to cheer way too loudly and probably cry. And I will absolutely be one of the first people standing when those kids finish their show.

Because when you work at Pyware, you spend a lot of time looking at dots on a computer screen and answering countless phone calls and chats from directors and designers. But Saturdays at the stadium remind me that those dots aren’t dots at all. They’re months of rehearsal, late nights, early mornings, sunburns, metronomes, dot books, water jugs, bus rides, and memories those students will talk about long after they march off that field for the last time.

And yeah…

I’ll probably still be wondering if that transition was made with the Morph tool, haha.