Members of the band from West Virginia University will travel Saturday to M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore to play during the game against the Terps from the University of Maryland, College Park, which is still in the Atlantic Coast Conference but has decided to join the Big 10 next year, the Baltimore Sun reports.
M&T Bank Stadium isn’t the University of Maryland’s normal home field, so the site is considered neutral, but the game is still considered a home game for the Terps. Using its authority as the home team, the athletic director’s office at the university has barred the marching band from West Virginia from performing its eight-minute show on the field at halftime.
Zack Bolno, senior associate athletics director of media relations for the University of Maryland, issued a brief statement Wednesday:
It is our practice at Maryland to only have the Maryland Band perform on the field during our home football games. While the visiting team bands do not perform on the field, we are always pleased to set aside a section of seats within the visiting team section for them and we encourage the visiting team band to attend and perform from their seats for the enjoyment of their team and fans.
We are following our standard practice with the West Virginia Band on Saturday and we have set aside seats for them near the field. We communicated this information to the band representatives at West Virginia last June in order to allow them plenty of time for appropriate planning.
Well, if it’s a “practice at Maryland,” it’s not a longstanding one, that’s for sure. West Virginia’s band performed as a visiting band at M&T Bank Stadium in 2005, and many fans on the band’s Facebook page say they remember performing at Maryland games.
The University of Maryland band reportedly tried to get the athletic staff to reverse the decision when they found out about it, but to no avail, the Charleston Gazette reports.
“This has nothing to do with the Maryland band. As college bands we all support each other, and the Maryland marching band did their best to try to help reverse this decision. This was definitely not their doing,” the Gazette quoted West Virginia’s band director, Jay Drury, as saying. “We’ve talked to the (Maryland) band several times.”
An outpouring of support for the WVU band is seen on the aforementioned Facebook page and in newspaper reader comments, even in the Baltimore Sun, here, although there are also comments like, “This is just the band, no big deal” and “It’s a Maryland home game, so keep your folks in West Virginia.”
“We’re always appreciative when the fans show their support,” Mr Drury was quoted, in the Gazette, as saying. “Probably one of the things most disappointing about this is that our kids really enjoy performing for their fans and getting on the field to show what they can do. The fact that we have a lot of fans that are going to be there and that a lot of our kids come from Maryland or surrounding areas, it means the field is a lot closer for some families than WVU and they won’t get to see them perform.”
Some readers have even reminded the athletic staff from the University of Maryland that the Big 10 has a policy against this sort of thing. The All-American Marching Band from Purdue University, for instance, has a guidebook (see page 16 of the PDF, here) for band members that specifically encourages sensitivity when performing at away games and spending the night in strangers’ homes.
Fans in Baltimore have not been very hospitable in the past to people who support athletic opponents, as a report in the Baltimore Sun of a fan beating up a Yankee fan, just for being a visiting fan, shows, here. The attitude in Baltimore seems to suggest that people who want to cheer for the “other” team should do so in the comfort of their own homes.
The kind of hospitality mature adults should show, spoken about in the Purdue band guidebook cited above, appears to be completely absent in Maryland, from Baltimore all the way down to the AD’s office in College Park at the esteemed University of Maryland. This action is an embarrassment to the great institution of learning that school should represent for its students and the citizens of the state.
West Virginia University, established in 1867, brings a marching band, the Pride of West Virginia, winner of the 1997 Sudler Trophy from the John Philip Sousa Foundation, to M&T Bank Stadium, home of the defending Super Bowl champion Baltimore Ravens, Saturday for an away game against the Terps from the University of Maryland, which has denied the Pride an opportunity to perform on the field during halftime and which will soon play in the Big 10, the conference where halftime entertainment by a marching band began more than a century ago. Members of the WVU Band, under the leadership of Jay Drury, will still travel to the game to play in the stands to enthusiastically support the Mountaineer Football team, according to the group’s website, and the staff has officially thanked fans for their support.
