Assignment 2 Final
Clay Romero
Professor Cori Spillane
Eng 160 Rough Draft
2 October 2024
SUNY New Paltz Proposal
Dear Jane Sileo & Samantha Davis,
SUNY New Paltz has many wonderful things. More specifically, it has a wonderful community of students and staff who adore the college. However, the one thing that it does not have is a football team, and a marching band. It is something that the University should invest in creating. Football and marching band are two things that they could create at the same time. Both activities exercise you, and both activities are something that the majority of people love watching. These two subjects can make game attendance better, affect the community morale, and help you with exercise.
Watching both a football game and a marching band perform is an amazing sight to see. Marching bands have been proven to make more students attend games. It is a motivator not only for sports fans but for music fans as well. It is a way to get people with different interests into one place for a community. An article states that “Marching bands are an integral part of the college football game-day experience by increasing both the quantity and quality of entertainment” (Natke). This is true as people have done experiments about this, as Natke says, “The impact of these influences on game-day attendance is explored using data from nine years of regular season games in Division II.” It is clear from the article that Natke provides that a marching band performing for a football team brings in more people. There have been multiple studies, and they even use data from years ago to compare it. Bringing in both a marching band and a football team would be able to bring the SUNY New Paltz community together, and it would be worth the investment.
Something that many people do not know is that while the marching band brings in a bigger audience, it can also affect the football team. Port Clinton students are one of the many students who love the marching band and have a huge passion for it. While the marching band students are excited to perform, it is also a “pregame pep rally for fans who can’t wait for the game to express their school spirit” (Chauncery). This statement shows us the fact that even in the case where the marching band is performing before the football teams, people are still having the school spirit because they know that it is their fellow students, just like the football team. Marching bands are important because it helps with the home-team performance. Having a good marching band can boost team morale and raise the mood if they are low. Along with that, marching bands have a way of making you want to root for that team more. It shows that the school put in enough care and effort to create a marching band, rehearse until it is perfect, and perform it on the field for both teams to witness. It shows the whole audience that the school does not only care for sports, but for the arts as well. This is something that many students notice, and schools should know. We are aware when the schools favor sports over the arts.
Football and marching band go hand in hand, but it is possible to have one without the other. I believe that if football is added into SUNY New Paltz, that a marching band has to be formed; but if a marching band is formed, a football team is not needed. When there are football games, it is tradition to have a marching band play during the intermission, and usually they are happy to do so. However, without a football team, a marching band can still exist. It does not need a football team because on its own, it is a sport. Marching bands have many perks, one of the main ones is that it is a form of exercise. It is “stated that heart rate and oxygen intake measurements indicated tenor drum musicians expend energy at a rate comparable with a marathon runner midrace” (Cumberledge). This is only one of the many instances where participating in marching bands is proven to help you exercise. Another important example is that marching band “…can positively influence students’ lives by increasing speech production and breath support” (Cumberledge). It is clear that a marching band can stand alone, and it can become a sport that many more students can join for exercise, or for fun.
SUNY New Paltz is a wonderful school, and there are many things that they are doing right. However, there are also some things that it is lacking. One of the things is having a football team, and a marching band. There are clearly many good reasons that SUNY New Paltz should have these two things. Having a marching band with a football team can affect the game day attendance. Even without a football team and only a marching band, it can affect how the SUNY New Paltz community feels altogether, and it is a fun way to exercise.
Works Cited
Alcorn, Chauncey. “Port Clinton Students Will Play with OSU Band Prior to Football Game.” McClatchy – Tribune Business News, Tribune Content Agency LLC, 2008.
Cumberledge, Jason P. “The Benefits of College Marching Bands for Students and Universities: A Review of the Literature.” Update : Applications of Research in Music Education, vol. 36, no. 1, 2017, pp. 44–50, https://doi.org/10.1177/8755123316682819.
Natke, Paul A., and Elizabeth A. Thomas. “Does a Marching Band Impact College Football Game Attendance? A Panel Study of Division II.” Applied Economics Letters, vol. 26, no. 16, 2019, pp. 1354–57, https://doi.org/10.1080/13504851.2018.1558339.