With the Band

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Perched on a side table among the papers, gadgets and memorabilia in the overstuffed office of associate band director Chad Shoopman ’96 ’99 was a bronze statue of a drum major rising out of a football stadium: the Sudler Trophy. Awarded by the John Philip Sousa Foundation to collegiate marching bands of uncommon excellence and contribution to the art, the trophy was officially presented to the University of Arizona’s Pride of Arizona band during halftime of the Arizona-Houston game, after which was placed in the Jim Click Hall of Champions on the north side of the McKale Center. 

But back in early November, it was still in the side table in Shoopman’s office. “They won’t let us post pictures of it until it’s officially presented,” Shoopman says. “But I mean, it’s got ‘The University of Arizona, 2024,’ right there on the front,” he says. 

There’s something a little mystical about the band. How they set their instruments down in a long, neat line on the field during rehearsal breaks. How their stadium section is always immaculate after games. (“We pick up all the trash,” Shoopman says. “Right where we are. Every space we occupy.”) How they are somehow both 250-plus people — horn players, color guard, twirlers — and one at the same time: this red-white-and-blue colossus shimmying and undulating down the field, all power and precision, but a little funky, too. We come for the game. But the band opens the portal to that primitive feeling that puts us over the top. 

You will not see this at a football stadium in Lima or on a cricket field in Ahmedabad. Among the criteria for Sudler Trophy winners is having made “outstanding contributions to the American way of life” — a grandiose phrase, no doubt, but one that reflects the endemic quality of the marching band in general. When you hear one — the blare of the horns, the rattle and thunder of the drumline — you won’t mistake yourself for being anywhere else in the world. 

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Part of Shoopman’s challenge as a director is balancing the comforts of tradition with the nudge of something more creative or progressive. He has a background in both jazz and the direction of Disney bands, in the rigorous art of music and the light entertainment of it. Playing a track by DMX — an artist who helped define the massive attack of late-’90s radio rap — and Rossini’s “William Tell Overture” back to back isn’t just eclecticism, it’s a reminder that these two seemingly irreconcilable types of music actually serve the same social purpose: to light the audience up with power. 

“We try to make the offerings that we play diverse for our students,” Shoopman says. “Good presentations of what I hope is quality material that also serves the general public in terms of elevating their gameday experience.” 

Currently, the band represents more than a hundred majors across every college. “You have an engineer talking to an architect, which might be related,” Shoopman says. “But not to the veterinary science person or the arts person. They all figure out how to learn and lead people that don’t see the world like they do.” When they won the Sudler, Shoopman says, the band collectively sent notes to every dean on campus, “thanking them for their students’ contribution not only to what they’re studying to be in the real world, but that community Wildcat spirit, the life on campus, the way people associate the university with that feeling.”

It bears mentioning that this is all a huge amount of work, starting with a week of band camp before the fall semester starts, where students spend hours in the paralyzing heat memorizing music, working out routines, learning their coordinates on a field, twirling, blowing, and generally applying themselves with an intensity they probably haven’t applied themselves with before. For a lot of band members, that week is their first experience at college. 

At a recent Band Day performance — an annual event hosted at Arizona Stadium to showcase exceptional high-school bands from across the state — the Pride played a program of Michael Jackson music. It was great: familiar but novel, powerful but nuanced. Have you ever seen a drumline play a perfect fill step by step, each player passing the beat to the person next to them like a current lighting up a string of lights? It’s exhilarating. Almost impossible seeming. That was “Smooth Criminal.” At the end of the program, fireworks. Some students were there from dawn until midnight. 

Yeah, Shoopman says: The day show was great. But the night show. You had to have been at the night show. “It just had something to it that was like, ‘wow, this is really happening,’” he says. “It was like magic.”