Day 1

Date: May 15, 2011

Time: 10:05pm

Playing on iTunes: “Who Am I Living For” by Katy Perry

(left to right) Taylor, me, Nate; UMass friends and
Cadets spring training roommates

Day one...rain, but it was a great success! Lots of fun...Fortunately we were inside today. As most of the people are saying from the drum corps, the first few days of spring training feels like a weekend camp and not like spring training. Once you’ve reached day 3 or so, you begin to realize that it’s not just a weekend getaway and you have to be ready for the long hall...90 days of hard work and dedication. I’m used to getting up at 7am every day so that’s not such a bad thing, and running around to get where we need to go is not out of the normal for me...so I guess you could say that so far it’s not anything out of the normal for my daily routine aside from actually having to go to academic classes. 

The pit setting up in the band room getting ready for the day.

A normal scheduled day for us during spring training is:

7:00a - Breakfast

8:00 - Day Meeting

8:30 - Physical Training

9:30 - Section Rehearsal

12:00p - Lunch

1:00 - Section Rehearsal

5:30 - Snack

6:00 - Ensemble Rehearsal

9:00 - Dinner

10:00 - Meetings or More Section Rehearsal

We were supposed to have a meeting with the director, George Hopkins, tonight but it was postponed. In those meetings (we call them “Hop Meetings”) he updates us about what’s going on with the corps, the show, and anything else we need to talk about. He may give us some assignments such as (the most recent one was) “Where are you going to be when you’re 40?”. I highly enjoy those meetings so I’m bummed we did not have one tonight but I did get some time to write in my blog and start the first out of two books I’m planning on reading this summer: “You’re Brain on Music” by Daniel Levitin. The second book is “The World in Six Songs” by Daniel Levitin. Well I must head out because we have a pit meeting with our sectional leader soon.

Mallets that I broke on the first day

P.S. Just got back from the pit meeting and we received our drumline necklaces. This is a thing everyone that makes the Cadets drumline (battery and pit) receives. It comes with one bead for every year that you’ve been a part of the Cadets; sort of like a dogtag for people in the army, except we don’t have our names on them.

Quote of the day: “Always look good”