CCHS Band got rained out in their region UIL competition. They managed to advance to finals, but were unable to continue the competition due to bad weather conditions.

“So we marched the prelims, great run,” band director Jeremey Rehbein said. “It was beautiful. The first rain delay was real quick after us. It was right at the end of the morning block events, which was a hour and a half rain delay. So we’re hanging out in the school, just waiting. An hour and a half later, we come back. One band plays, it was Porter. And then the lightning alarm goes off, right in the middle of them on the field playing. And then that was a three hour rain delay. So what happened is, it just got so late in the day that they didn’t have [enough] time to bring all the bands that made finals back – which we did. We placed fourth out of 13 and they took the top seven to finals. But what happened was, [that] we didn’t get that, we didn’t get the opportunity. You’re supposed to get the opportunity twice to make it to state in that same day, and we didn’t get that.”

Some band students felt relieved that they didn’t have to continue the competition, because they felt they weren’t as mentally prepared for it.

“I was also happy about it [being cancelled] because our first round was really good, and I didn’t know if our second one was gonna be as good,” junior Brent Humberson said. “We kind of got out of that mindset because we were excited about how good the first run was.”

One thing the band kids were worried about was getting injured.

“I know some people were scared that they were going to slip on the tarp because it was pretty slippery,” junior Alinne Flores said.

Another problem that raced some of their minds was performing close to midnight.

“We were kind of freaking out, because a guy had told us that it could take until midnight once the rain had stopped to finish finals,” Flores said. “I feel like we all would have been really tired and really drained.”

At the end of the day, the directors feel like the decision to cancel the tournament was the right one.

“I don’t necessarily feel cheated because we had a great performance,” Rehbein said. “Our position ended up being that they should do what they did. We decided that for the better of the kids because it was late, the weather was crazy. We’re starting to get late at night. They had the stadium till midnight. They kept telling us ‘hey, we got it till midnight so we can you know,’ and I started thinking that’s unfair to everybody because kids are going to be hungry. We only got money for two meals to feed everybody. So logistically it got to where we couldn’t manage that and none of the other bands could eat. So our position [was that] we agreed that they should make it a one shot deal, and then take preliminary scores, rank everybody by that and just leave it as is. That’s what they ended up doing, was what we thought they should do.”