Longmont drumline receives top score in competition among regional schools

Mar. 23—The Longmont High School gym was filled with the pounding of percussion on Saturday during a Rocky Mountain Percussion Association drumline competition, with local winter ensemble the Longmont Combined Schools Drumline taking home the highest score.

The Longmont Combined Schools Drumline hosted Saturday's competition. It includes students from Longmont High School, Silver Creek High School, Lyons Middle/Senior High School and Westview Middle School.

The Longmont drumline received a score of 84.150, beating out scores from 19 different school drumlines from across Colorado. Other local drumlines represented Broomfield, Monarch and Legacy high schools; Frederick High School's drumline also participated in the competition for the first time.

Rob Cronin, a parent volunteer with the Longmont Combined Schools Drumline, said this year's competition pulled schools from Colorado Springs in the south to Fort Collins in the north.

For the Longmont drumline, Cronin said the event is a chance to see how much the local community supports the ensemble.

"It's fun to come support your home team on their home field," Cronin said.

Even with the statewide talent, Cronin said the atmosphere of the competition is always friendly.

"They're definitely competing — they want to be better than each other — but it isn't that cutthroat (attitude) of, 'I want to do better, so you should do worse,'" he said.

Last year, the Longmont Combined Schools Drumline placed sixth at the Winter Guard International World Championships in Ohio. The group will return to that competition next month.

Cronin, whose daughter plays snare drum in the drumline, said he likes that the group lets students excel in a different kind of sport.

"This is her sport, and she gets to stretch musically," Cronin said. "She gets leadership opportunities, and the camaraderie among the group, it's really healthy. To me, that's a really rich environment to get to be a part of."

The Longmont drumline took the gym floor Saturday afternoon to play for a full audience in the bleachers. The group's program, "Playing With Colors," constructed an ethereal symphony using marimbas, a harp, a bass guitar and plenty of drums.

The performers also wore multicolored clothing and rotated colorful plastic vinyl rectangles around the gym floor during the program.

"We like to use visual colors to represent ideas of being unique and being expressive," said drumline member Carter Martin, a senior at Silver Creek High. "Having a lot of different colors on the floor shows that we're all different people with different abilities, but we can still come together to make one cohesive thing."

During the week of spring break, the Longmont drumline practiced eight hours a day to hone their skills ahead of this weekend's competition. Simon Von Hatten, a Longmont High senior, said that "fine tuning" was evident in the ensemble's performance on Saturday.

"There's still definitely room to grow for the rest of the season," Von Hatten said. "But the work that we've put in this past week has removed any doubt that I had of us not taking it as far as we can."