I did marching band for four years in high school and not once did anyone outside of the band community recognize us as a sport.
Most of you must think marching band isn’t a sport, but why? We have practices like every other sport. There’s a week-long band camp, usually during the hottest week of summer, where we stand outside for about nine hours each day. While outside, we do exercises: stretches to warm us up, run around the track a couple times and marching.
Marching is a very precise art that takes a very long time to learn, and so we spend hours on hours standing at attention and going through different drills to perfect our marching. There are also different sizes of instruments ranging from little flutes and clarinets to ginormous tubas and drum sets. The latter take an immense amount of strength and stamina to march with during a nine hour day.
Being a part of marching band also means you aren’t recognized for most of the effort you put in. In high school, we had many pep assemblies. We’d have assemblies before dances to get everybody excited for the upcoming weekend festivities. At these assemblies they would announce everyone on the sports teams during that season: fall was football and volleyball, winter was basketball, wrestling and so on. Do you think our principal even mentioned that there were band kids sitting in the bleachers? Nope.
We’d spend hours practicing our music and learning our drill to make sure we’d have the perfect show. No one told us at school how great our halftime show was on Friday night. We’d put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into our halftime shows every year, and all we want in return is to be acknowledge as a sport.