The Seneca Golden Eagles Band is marching into its ninth year under band director Keith Styers with its largest membership yet. For Styers, that has been the goal since his first day at Seneca.
“My focus and vision have always been that it is more important to have more students involved in the band, not the competition aspect,” Styers said. “We have different priorities and that is to ensure the kids have a great experience, the opportunity to learn and be a part of something. It’s about the journey, not the end result.”
True to Styer’s vision, Seneca hosted its 10th annual USBands competition on Saturday, Sept. 28 made up of schools in the district as well as schools from Washington Township and West Windsor.
“Since we hosted the competition, it’s an exhibition, and we don’t place. The competition raised money for our program,” Styers said. “We don’t have the biggest competition, and we’re fine with that, but it does give the kids an opportunity to see what we’re doing in comparison to other bands.”
According to the USBands rulebook, USBands uses a classification system based on groupand class designations to make sure bands of similar size, style and experience are grouped together to compete. A tier-based system is utilized where each competitive class is judged on a separate scale that reflects the expected level of proficiency.
Class “A” bands are judged on a scale with fundamental to intermediate skills’, bands classified as “Open” are judged based on intermediate to advanced skills. Groups are based on the number of performers.
Lenape Regional High School District schools do not compete in the same group due to varying sizes of the bands. Of the schools, Cherokee is the largest and placed into 5A. Shawnee is considered to be more experienced, but smaller in size and competes at 4 Open. Lenape competes at 2 Open, and Seneca competes at the 4A level.
The Golden Eagles practice and compete in a similar fashion to sports teams, but Styers attempts to schedule practices and events to allow students to be a part of other clubs.
“We practice two days a week in the evening, and then again Fridays before football games and again Saturdays before competitions,” Styers said. “A lot of our students have jobs or want to participate in other clubs so I’ve always tried to make our schedule flexible to that.
Styers credits the band reaching its highest level of members at 94 to two things.
“We have tremendous support from our administration. Principal Spektor and Bradley Bauer, the assistant principal, are very supportive of our program and our goals for the program. We also have a great parent association that supports our events,” Styers said. “In addition to that, we have very little attrition, rarely does the program lose kids year to year.”
Using “Rocky Balboa” as last year’s theme left the Golden Eagles with a tough act to follow. Styers chose “My First Trip to the Magic Kingdom.” Fitting as Seneca performed on Main Street in Disney World earlier this year.
