Saraland High School’s marching band, known as the Spartan Sound, has been named Band of the Week for week 11 of the JBT Power Band of the Week program, a recognition voted on by 5th Quarter that spotlights standout high school bands across the region.
The weekly honor has become a fixture of the high school football season along the Gulf Coast, shining a light on the programs that fill stadium stands with music every Friday night. Voters weighing this week’s field settled on the Spartan Sound, whose performances through the fall have made the group one of the more visible bands in the Mobile area.
The award celebrates the group’s performances throughout the fall marching season, including its halftime shows at Saraland football games. Halftime is where a marching band’s season lives or dies in the eyes of a hometown crowd, and the Spartan Sound’s shows at Spartan Stadium have drawn attention beyond the school community as the program’s reputation has grown.
Saraland’s band program operates in one of the fastest-growing school systems in Alabama, a district that has invested steadily in its schools as the city’s population has climbed. The band’s rise tracks with that growth, building from a solid regional program into one that now competes for honors across state lines and on national stages.
The people behind the sound
The Spartan Sound is led on the field by head drum major Ella Criswell and is directed by band director Chase Davidson, who oversees a program that includes winds, percussion, color guard and a dance team.
The drum major’s role places Criswell at the center of the band’s on-field performance, conducting the ensemble and setting the tempo that keeps dozens of musicians aligned across a football field. Drum majors are selected through an evaluation process that weighs musicianship, leadership and the ability to command a field, and the position carries responsibility for both performance and the behind-the-scenes discipline that makes a show possible.
Davidson’s oversight extends across the program’s full range, from the marching field to the concert stage and the winter indoor season. Programs of that breadth require directors to teach across musical genres, manage equipment and logistics for multiple ensembles, and coordinate the schedules of student musicians whose commitments span the entire school year.
Band members say the recognition reflects months of after-school rehearsals and weekend competitions that go into building each season’s marching show. The work begins in summer band camp, when students learn the show’s music and drill in the August heat, and continues through weekly rehearsals that refine each movement until the full production comes together under the Friday night lights.
5th Quarter’s Band of the Week voting draws participation from band communities across the region, with fans, parents and students casting ballots each week during football season. Winning the weekly honor places a program in the company of the Gulf Coast’s most recognized bands and gives students a public acknowledgment of the work that usually unfolds far from the scoreboard.
A season of superior ratings
The program has built a reputation for consistency, earning superior ratings this year in marching band, concert band, jazz band, percussion ensemble and winter guard evaluations. Superior is the top rating available in the evaluation systems used across Alabama, and sweeping the category across five distinct ensemble types is a mark of a program with depth well beyond its marching show.
Concert and jazz evaluations test a different set of skills than the marching field, asking musicians to perform judged repertoire in seated ensembles where intonation, balance and technique are measured against exacting standards. The winter guard and percussion ensemble competitions extend that calendar into the spring, keeping students engaged in indoor circuits that mirror the intensity of fall marching season.
Individual sections have also picked up multiple best-in-class awards, with the percussion line, color guard and dance team each singled out for recognition at various contests. Section-level awards matter because they show the program is not simply riding a strong top line; each component of the band is competing successfully against its peers from other schools.
That breadth of achievement reflects a deliberate program structure, in which students progress from beginner instruction through advanced ensembles and specialize as they develop. Percussionists, guard members and dancers train with dedicated instructors, and the investment shows up in the results the program has accumulated across its competitive calendar.
On the competitive circuit
On the competitive marching circuit, the Spartan Sound placed second at the South Alabama Marching Championships this season, one of the more closely watched marching contests in the region. The championship draws programs from across the southern part of the state, and a second-place finish there positions the band among the strongest in its class for the season.
The band has also traveled outside Alabama this year, taking home superior ratings at contests held in Mississippi as well as at home. Traveling to out-of-state competitions exposes students to programs they would never face in local contests, and the results the Spartan Sound has carried home from those trips have reinforced the program’s standing beyond its own region.
Competition weekends are the culmination of months of work, with students loading equipment before dawn, performing in preliminary rounds and often returning for finals the same evening. The logistics fall on directors, chaperones and booster volunteers who move instruments, uniforms and props from venue to venue across the season.
Saraland’s rise as a school system has been one of the notable stories in Alabama public education over the past decade, with the city’s separation from the Mobile County system and its subsequent growth producing new campuses and expanded programs. Band programs often serve as the public face of that kind of investment, performing at community events, parades and ceremonies that put students in front of the city year-round.
From Saraland to the national stage
Beyond Friday night halftime shows and local competitions, the Spartan Sound has represented Saraland on a national stage. The band has performed at the National Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, D.C., and at the Fiesta Flambeau parade in San Antonio, Texas, two of the largest parade events in the country that regularly draw top high school and collegiate bands from across the nation.
The National Cherry Blossom Festival fills the nation’s capital each spring with events commemorating the gift of cherry trees from Japan more than a century ago, and its parade down Constitution Avenue is among the most visible performance opportunities available to an American high school band. Invitations to perform there are extended through a selective process, and a Mobile-area band appearing in the lineup marks a milestone for the program and the city it represents.
The Fiesta Flambeau holds similar weight in Texas, where the night parade through downtown San Antonio is billed as the largest illuminated night parade in the country. Performing in it requires bands to sustain their playing and marching after dark along a long parade route lined with spectators, a different kind of test from the field competitions that fill the fall calendar.
Trips of that scale depend on fundraising and community support, with band boosters organizing the travel, lodging and equipment movement that national performances require. The investments the Saraland community has made in its band program come back in the form of students performing before national audiences in the nation’s capital and one of the country’s largest cities.
What drives the program
Band directors said the goal of the program remains providing students with a rigorous but supportive musical experience, one that builds discipline and teamwork alongside musicianship. The philosophy shows in the program’s structure, which asks a great deal of students while surrounding them with the instruction and peer support they need to meet those expectations.
For the students who carry the program, the season’s honors are the product of hundreds of hours spent on practice fields, in rehearsal rooms and on parade routes far from home. The Band of the Week recognition lands late in the fall season, a nod to everything the Spartan Sound has already accomplished and a measure of the standard the program has set for itself heading into the competitions and performances still ahead.
With winterguard and concert season on the horizon, the program’s year is far from over. The same students honored this week will return to the stage in seated ensembles and indoor circuits, where the superior ratings the program has collected in recent years will be put on the line again as the Spartan Sound’s season rolls on.
Music education advocates point to programs like Saraland’s as evidence of what sustained investment in the arts produces, from academic gains among participating students to the community pride that comes with competitive success. The Spartan Sound’s calendar of evaluations, contests and national performances gives its members a level of engagement that research links to stronger attendance and graduation outcomes across a student’s high school career.
The recognition also lands at a moment when the program’s younger members are watching what the upperclassmen have built. Band programs sustain themselves by passing culture from class to class, and seasons like this one teach incoming members what the standard looks like, from the discipline of summer rehearsals to the payoff of a superior rating at the season’s end.