About 280 students from nine schools in Starke County and Marshall County took to the Plymouth High School football field Monday night to practice marching for the Indianapolis 500 parade set to take place Saturday, May 28.
Students from Plymouth, LaVille, Bremen, Triton, Argos, Culver, Knox, North Judson-San Pierre and Oregon-Davis are participating in this All-Marshall/Starke Bi-County Band.
Plymouth High School Band Director Bryan Ames said it is a unique opportunity for all of the schools to come together to participate in such a prestigious event.
“This is a chance where we can just come together and work together as a single unit,” stated Ames. “The neat thing about this band is out of the nine groups that are here today only five of them have a competitive marching band. Four of these schools have not had a chance to do anything like this before or get out and do the marching band activity. We have a lot of kids in our group today who will be experiencing this for the first time.”
The parade was not scheduled in 2020 or 2021 due to COVID-19 so Ames said the students are excited to participate this year.
Like Ames said, some students have not participated in the marching band so some coordination took place to get those students acclimated to the routine of parade marching.
Knox High School Band Director Craige Phipps said he is proud of the students from Knox and from all of the schools.
Phipps commented, “This is Knox’s first year participating in this parade and it’s a very cool event. We were going to do it years ago and then unfortunately COVID shut us down so we didn’t get to participate back then. All the directors this year for the first time were able to participate and travel so we decided ‘this is a cool event and let’s do it.’ As you can see, we’ve got 280 kids. It’s an awesome thing and we’re excited about it.
The parade steps off at noon ET May 28 in downtown Indianapolis.
