Marching 100 to begin its 2014 season with 170 students

Last year, 149 students took the field with the Marching 100. This year, FAMU will take a slightly larger band of 170 students to Miami for its first halftime performance of the year.

The Marching 100 that is heading to Sun Life Stadium has more returning members than the previous season’s band did. Back in 2013, Director of Bands Sylvester Young said that about 70 percent of the Marching 100’s membership was new. According to a story published by WFSU, just under half of this year’s student musicians are rookies.

Young has said that the ideal size for the Marching 100 is 256-320 members, rather than the previous 400+ members.

The band’s size has also shrunken due to new eligibility requirements for its membership. They include a four-year cap on the number of years a student can participate in music department bands and a requirement that all band members be enrolled full-time at FAMU.

Leroy Lubin, principal of the trumpet section, says that many of the new members needed lots of teaching.

“There’s a lot they need to learn,” Lubin said in an interview. “Some of them kind of know some of the concepts because their high schools do what FAMU does, but then you have kids who have never marched a day in their lives. Then you have kids who went to core-style bands, and they’ve never had to lift up their knees. So we have to take it to the basics, like day-one fundamentals: teaching them how we march, how to point your toe in the air, how to drive it in the ground – toe, ball, heel.”