MILTON \u2014 Residents living near Milton’s Alumni Field heard some familiar sounds Thursday and Friday as the Pacific Crest Drum Corps returned for rehearsals as part of its East Coast tour.<\/p>\n
The corps, from Industry, California, is a member of Drum Corps International’s World Class corps, among the most elite band competitors in the world.<\/p>\n
Milton Area School Board President Brett Hosterman, a former marching band director, is the local host coordinator for the team.<\/p>\n
“They came though here last year and need a place to stay at the last minute,” Hosterman said. “They enojoyed our facility so much, and they were a great guest so we invited them back this year.<\/p>\n
“This year they will be here for an extended period of time.”<\/p>\n
Pacific Crest rehearsed twice in Milton on Friday and will rehearse again from 8:30 a.m. to noon on Saturday.<\/p>\n
The public is invited to watch the rehearsals.<\/p>\n
The corps will compete in the DCI Easter Classic at 7 p.m. Saturday in Allentown and at Big Sounds in Motion in Downingtown on Sunday.<\/p>\n
“Our competitions generally start in late June and go into early August,” snare drum instructor Gabriel Bustamante, of San Diego, said. “So it’s definitely a summer thing, but we do start rehearsals in spring. We have a spring training kind of system, similar to baseball.”<\/p>\n
Pacific Crest is capped at 165 members and features drums, color guard and a brass theater.<\/p>\n
At competitions, their routine runs for 10 minutes.<\/p>\n
They spend 12 hours a day rehearsing.<\/p>\n
“Even though it’s only 10 minutes of performance, these performances last a lifetime,” Darien Cobb, 21, of Moreno Valley, California, said. “When I first discovered the activity, I was watching shows from 2008, 2010, and they had such a profound impact on me. I know this is what I wanted to do.”<\/p>\n
Bustamante had a similar path to joining Pacific Crest.<\/p>\n
“I joined drumline when I was in middle school, which opened up the doors to me saying, ‘let me look up drum corps on YouTube. Let me look up this drum line, let me look up that drum line,’ and I got super addicted super early on, when I was 12 years old,” he said.<\/p>\n
Cobb is the overall leader of the brass sections, of which there are four sections, all with their own leaders. He has participated in the corps for three years. This is his last year performing.<\/p>\n
He said he signed up for a leadership position because he wanted to be one of the people helping new competitors adjust to the rigorous competition season, during which band members burn 6,000 calories per day.<\/p>\n
Cobb said the corps gets a lot of students who are about to graduate or who have just graduated high school.<\/p>\n
“It’s a big transition,” Cobb said. “You go from high school band with one or two rehearsals a week, maybe three hours, transitioning to 12-hour rehearsals every single day.<\/p>\n
“It’s a big shift mentally and physically.”<\/p>\n
Corps Director Chris Henderson has been with Pacific Crest for a little over two decades \u2014 performing, then teaching before moving on to tour management and operations management before his current role.<\/p>\n
“The marching part is something that is dear to me,” he said. “I had an opportunity years ago teaching marching bands across SoCal and this is that next level.<\/p>\n
“You get to take the top percentage of students across the nation to form an organization and perform at the highest level.”<\/p>\n
Henderson said corps’ activity is built around camping life inside schools.<\/p>\n
Corps members sleep on air mattresses, cots or mattress pads on gym floors, use the school showers and rely on a food truck, which produces about 800 meals a day, he said.<\/p>\n
Henderson said constant traveling, training and living in close quarters in the gymnasiums leads to a real family atmosphere, which is the best part of the experience for him.<\/p>\n
“Ultimately, it\u2019s the people. It’s amazing to see the strangers become a tight-knit community in such a short amount of time,” he said. “We are rehearsing day in and day out and traveling day in and day out. We only have so many days to do this, then when that second week of August rolls around, your season’s over.<\/p>\n
“So we make the best of what we can. We produce a great show and we try to get these performers to the highest caliber we can.”<\/p>\n
Cobb said the corps members are human, so there can be occasional contention in the 165-member family, but the corps’ leaders help to smooth over issues.<\/p>\n
“At the end of the day we know that we\u2019re doing this thing all together on the field,” Cobb said. “We know that we all signed up to do this thing because we love to do this.”<\/p>\n
“This is a pretty intense thing,” Bustamante said. “A very elite activity, and it takes a lot to want to take part in this.”<\/p>\n
Hosterman said he was pleased to see Alumni Stadium getting some offseason activity.<\/p>\n
“As a board member, I was very supportive of building our new stadium,” he said. “This is another case of how we can use it for more than just athletics.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MILTON \u2014 Residents living near Milton’s Alumni Field heard some familiar sounds Thursday and Friday as the Pacific…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":256885,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[119,121,120,91649,109301,109293,109290,109291,109297,109296,109295,2733,7185,109299,109294,109292,28,109298,109300],"class_list":["post-256884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news","tag-brass","tag-corps","tag-drum-and-bugle-corps","tag-drum-and-bugle-corps-modern","tag-drum-corps-international","tag-drum-corps-international-corps","tag-drum-corps-international-world-class-corps","tag-junior-drum-and-bugle-corps","tag-marching-band","tag-marching-bands","tag-military-commands","tag-military-marching","tag-pacific-crest-drum-and-bugle-corps","tag-pennsylvania","tag-performing-arts-companies","tag-wind-bands"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256884"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256884\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/256885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}