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Oak Mountain High School’s Spirit of Cahaba Marching Band is preparing its 2024 program “Imagine: Music of Dreams and Fantasy” to entertain many crowds this season. (For the Reporter/Bob Fitzgerald)

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Oak Mountain High School’s Spirit of Cahaba Marching Band is preparing its 2024 program “Imagine: Music of Dreams and Fantasy” to entertain many crowds this season. (For the Reporter/Bob Fitzgerald)

By TYLER RALEY | Special to the Reporter

NORTH SHELBY – The 2024 season is well underway for Oak Mountain High School’s Spirit of Cahaba Marching Band as it prepares to entertain many crowds with the halftime show “Imagine: Music of Dreams and Fantasy” this fall.

The group began its annual summer band camp on July 15, working on its program that it will perform on Friday nights during football season and at various competitions throughout the state.

This year’s band of just under 300 members is the largest in the school’s history and Associate Director of Bands Dr. Travis Bender is very optimistic about what his musicians can do on the field.

“I’m super excited,” Bender said. “The talent level top to bottom is very deep, so I’m excited to dig into the show.”

The students have been spending all summer memorizing the music and are now learning all of their “sets” that they march in the show, including specific icon sets, which are pictures formed during the show to create visual effects.

Bender spoke on how much the entertainment value goes into picking a show theme each year and how the staff strives to create a product that will translate well to the crowd.

“Every person has been to some venue before and watched entertainment that wasn’t, in fact, entertaining,” Bender said. “We want to make sure what we’re playing is recognizable and that even a crowd of people that may not have a musical background are going to hear the music, and even if they don’t know what it is they’re going to say, ‘I’ve heard that before. Where do I know that?’ It has some sort of connection with your crowd.”

This year’s production features many widely known arrangements, including music from Disney’s “Fantasia,” as well as themes from “How to Train Your Dragon” and “The Firebird Suite.”

With the camp occurring in the heat of the summer every year, learning a halftime show is physically taxing on a person’s body. As an educator and former marching band member himself, Bender understands that and said that staying healthy is crucial during this time of the year.

“If you haven’t been in a marching band before, you may not realize how taxing it is on the body and how high the physical demand is,” Bender said. “That endurance factor is extremely important for us. We do a lot of fundamental work, acclimating to the heat is critical, we teach the kids how to eat a well-balanced diet, the importance of hydration and sleep on top of just the music and the marching.”

All the moving parts of the band have helped to continue the long-standing support that the community has for the fine arts, which was initiated when the late Jim Duren founded the band program after coming from Pelham High School.

“When this school opened, the community of Oak Mountain was already extremely supportive of the arts from the ground up,” Bender said. “Since I’ve taken over, I have seen the band program grow in numbers, grow in support from the community and Mr. (Kevin) Ownby and I have worked hard to make sure that all facets of the band program are treated with equal importance.”

Bender continually looks back and is amazed by the support that the Spirit of Cahaba receives from band alumni old and new who helped build the program’s history. As football season inches closer, Bender finds that to be his favorite part of helping run this band camp and hopes this group will do just the same down the road.

“The impact over the years seems to be more profound,” Bender said. “It creates just an awesome culture for students to grow up in. Thankfully, as people grow up that were in band and they have their own kids, they tend to want to put their kids in band because they remember what the benefits were. To me, in terms of a profound impact, that just increases and grows every year because I love getting to see how the Oak Mountain band had a positive influence on people in their lives.”

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