Keeping marching band in step with good mental health

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Anyone who has performed in a competitive marching band knows how mentally demanding the experience can be. Those who have not can learn from Adam Shipman.

Shipman, 16, is a junior at Santa Gertrudis Academy High School in Kingsville, Texas. He's also a flute player and squad leader – equivalent to an assistant section leader – in the Mighty Lion Band, which regularly competes at the state's highest level.

To be that good takes work. During the fall, that means up to 90 minutes of rehearsals each day as part of a regular class. "Then after school, we meet from 6 to 8 every day, except for Wednesdays and Fridays," he said.

Fridays are for football games. An away game might mean the band doesn't get home until 1 a.m. or later. When competition season heats up in what some call "Bandtober," Shipman might have to report for duty at sunrise.

Shipman has to perform solos for stadiums full of people and, at competitions, in front of exacting judges. It's not enough to just know his own part; he has to be aware of the positions and performances of everyone around him, too.

It's a lot of pressure, he said. "It takes time and practice to be able to understand your instrument and understand what's happening," he said. "But those are things that I've learned to do over the years."

He feels rewarded for all that work. But researchers are just starting to take note of that line between pressure and pride that Shipman and thousands of other marchers walk each season.

A blend of athletics and performance art, marching band is on the periphery of several areas of study but fully embraced by none. So research on mental health and the marching arts is limited, said Dr. DaSean Young, an assistant professor of psychology at Pace University in New York.

Even getting a precise read on how many people participate is a challenge. Music for All, a nonprofit music education event and advocacy organization, uses an estimate of 20,000 high school marching bands in the U.S. Another estimate from 2015 put the number of people who march in college at 27,000.

Researchers and band participants alike agree, however, on how challenging marching can be.

Young's academic interest is in the psychological and developmental effects of the marching arts, but his own marching resume includes performing in color guard at his Maryland high school and as a member of the Wisconsin-based Madison Scouts Drum and Bugle Corps, which competes on the elite Drum Corps International circuit. He also was part of George Mason University's competitive winter guard and still helps teach high schoolers.

It's time-consuming at each level, Young said. References to band camp might make for easy punch lines, but for high schoolers, it's hard work that starts in the middle of summer and might involve weeks of nine- to 12-hour days. At the elite drum corps level, marchers live together for weeks of rehearsals before crisscrossing the country for competitions.

Such experiences can provide plenty of positives for mental health. A 2017 study in the Journal of Research in Music Education said that in addition to being culturally enriching, participating in the performing arts helps high school and college students learn to manage academic challenges and makes them less likely to engage in risky behavior, especially regarding alcohol. High schoolers in the performing arts also experienced a greater enjoyment of school and were more likely to attend college full-time.

"Some of the positive things that we tend to see with marching band artists are the group cohesion and peer support," said Dr. Toni Torres-McGehee, an associate professor of exercise science at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. "And there tends to be, a majority of the time, positive peer interaction, which can then foster a supportive environment."

Other researchers have noted how participants refer to their fellow marchers as "family." Such social connections have been shown to be important to health.

But Torres-McGehee, who was the first athletic trainer for the University of Alabama's Million Dollar Band, said those tight bonds can have a negative side that can disrupt mental health when they lead to social exclusion, bullying or hazing. In a 2015 survey of 1,215 college band members, nearly 30% said they had observed some form of hazing in their band, most commonly public verbal humiliation or degradation.

Marching is a physical challenge, and people often say the rigors of training and performing teach resilience, Young said, although his own research wasn't able to measure a benefit.

The demanding nature of marching arts also has an unhealthy side, said Dr. Dawn Emerson, a clinical assistant professor at the University of South Carolina who, along with Torres-McGehee and others, co-wrote a 2021 paper in the Journal of Eating Disorders about university marching artists, a term that includes musicians, color guard members, dancers and twirlers.

The study of 150 participants from three institutions examined risk factors for eating disorders with a focus on perfectionism. Nearly 80% of the participants exhibited this trait to some degree.

It's hard to hide a mistake while marching, Emerson said. Uniforms, with their white stripes on each leg, make it easy to spot flaws. "Everybody's picking out who's not in step or in line," she said.

Overall, the study found that the risk of an eating disorder was "highly prevalent" for both female and male performers, with women at higher risk than men.

Emerson, who played clarinet in marching bands in high school and college, said that in elite bands, the competitive pressure can begin during auditions. In some programs, those who don't make the cut are relegated to an auxiliary squad, which has to watch performances from the sidelines. Collegiate performers may appear before tens of thousands of people in football stadiums and perhaps millions more on TV.

It's a recipe for anxiety. Torres-McGehee said preliminary research among a sample of 609 collegiate performers found that about 40% experienced temporary ("state") anxiety, and about 70% had inherent ("trait") anxiety. The same research found that more than 60% were at risk of depression.

Young said that overall, research on depression and anxiety among marchers has been limited.

But all those apparent risks give band directors plenty of opportunity to help, the researchers said.

"Raising awareness of mental health is an issue in this population, and it's something that you need to be thinking about," Emerson said. She and Torres-McGehee said that bands should have athletic trainers on hand to relieve directors of having to deal with health care issues. "That's our job," Emerson said.

Torres-McGehee emphasized the need for setting a proper tone about the importance of mental health starts at the top. "If the band director's like, 'You're fine, just get over it, go home and get some rest and you'll be fine tomorrow,' that's very dismissive." Band leaders, she said, "need to listen and not judge what they're listening to, and not give advice, but give support," and help band members in need find a way to mental health specialists.

It can be hard for a director to keep track of hundreds of people, Emerson said, so section leaders should be trained about warning signs of mental health problems and told, "you need to keep an eye on your section."

Young agreed that the tone of the leadership could make a big difference. He also suggested that providing access to a sports psychologist would help, especially with young marchers.

It's one thing to help a person correct an error – "'Hey, you were late to count five. You need to get there a little faster.' That's not an attack on a student's well-being," he said. But some programs label people who are consistently out of place as a "tick," as in a negative mark on a judge's scorecard. "Sometimes students take it on as an identity." And while he isn't aware of research on that issue, it's clear that "the experience of being a 'tick' is not easy."

Anecdotally, Young has seen the opposite approach work. Many elite ensembles have been moving away from demeaning, punishing, militaristic approaches. The Bluecoats corps from Canton, Ohio, has been embracing a more uplifting approach for a decade, he said. It's an attitude that he thinks could help attract and retain the best performers, and to him, the proof is in the Bluecoats' recent Drum Corps International championship win.

"I think as people continue to see that groups like the Bluecoats do so much to support their membership and seem to be succeeding, we will continue to see that trickle down to the rest of the marching arts community," Young said.

Marchers also can lean on one another, he said. Among his high school students, he's watched as freshmen hit "the wall" – a term that describes the feelings of being overwhelmed that many inexperienced marchers face – "and then the seniors and the juniors and the sophomores all tell their stories about when they hit their wall and how they got through it."

Perspective helps, he said.

"This is supposed to be fun," Young said. He takes it seriously enough to have made it his career, but he keeps in mind that at its core, a marching band is maybe 100 people playing music and running around on a field. "In winter guard, we say, 'This is just bedsheets on shower poles in a gym.' Yes, you can assign a lot of your worth to this activity. But it's not all of your worth. It's not even really a significant percentage of your worth. You can be bad at this activity and still be a good person. You can be bad at this activity and still be loved."

In Kingsville, Shipman speaks of his band experience in positive terms.

He acknowledges the pressure but says it has taught him the value of hard work and dedication. It's made him learn how to manage his time – an important skill for a high school student who's involved in multiple clubs and aspires to study aerospace engineering at college.

Shipman has seen people criticize one another, but his directors have said "how this band is not one that we want to put each other down in, and we want to try and build each other. Because we all start somewhere. No matter who we are or where we came from, there's always that one time when you didn't know how to play your instrument, or you play mistakes."

Overall, band is fun, he said, thinking of the long trips to competitions where "you're just there with your friends," either playing, watching other bands or taking a break at a restaurant.

And it's forged connections with all kinds of people from all kinds of places, he said. "Whenever I go to region band or to any competition, there sometimes will be other band members who will just come up to our band and talk to us as if we knew each other for all our lives."