The band took part in the University Interscholastic League (UIL) competition on April 3 at the Hayes Performing Arts Center. Every year the Bowie band, along with other schools across Texas, perform in order to get feedback from judges. This feedback then helps the band get better each year.

“UIL provides a performance evaluation. It helps us to make sure our day to day rehearsals and learning are meeting a standard,” band director Ryan Thomas said.

During the start of the second semester, students find out what music they will be performing and they start to learn and perfect it in class. It is a long, stressful process to get ready for their performance but is thought to be worth the effort.

“To be up on stage can be both exciting and nerve-racking. It’s awesome to be able to present how much work we have put in as an ensemble, but scary because I don’t want to mess up,” percussionist Maya Webb said. “Overall, it was very rewarding because we had a good performance and we earned sweepstakes.”  

Some band directors do pass offs, which is when you play the piece to the director by yourself and if you succeed then you will not have to make it up at a later date. This change got the students to work harder on their music in order to play it the right way the first time.

“Personally, at UIL I felt really prepared because our band director did pass offs a little differently this year. Instead of only choosing small sections of the music we had to play the entire UIL concert for him,” Webb said. “This meant that I had to do a lot of practicing, but it paid off in the end and was very overall very effective.”

In the judging process, each piece is given a score on a scale of one to three; a one is excellent, a two is good with some mistakes, and a three means multiple mistakes were made and the tempo fluctuates. The concert winds are the third best band in the program. The freshman concert band is the fifth band in the Bowie program.

“The concert winds attempted a harder program than that band has ever tried and earned a rating of one from all three judges on stage. The freshman concert band also attempted music that was more difficult than that group usually plays and earned one ratings from two out of three judges on stage,”

Some of the bands had a perfect score and some of the bands had an almost perfect. The band and its directors worked hard to earn these ratings in UIL.

“The worst moment of the competition was physically going through the process itself- it can be quite exhausting,” band director Riaz Mohammed said. “Since we take so many bands, it is a two-day process for us and between performances, it was essentially 12 hour days.”

After UIL the senior class is almost done with the band program, they only have one more concert before they graduate from Bowie.

“The best moment for me was the moments on stage with seniors that I have taught since their freshman year and being able to be with them for their last UIL performance,” Thomas said.