Kenai band goes big

The Kenai Central High School Marching Band is continuing to grow, this year has a fun show based on a young adult dystopian fiction, and has set its sights on participating in the nation’s largest marching band competition next year. That’s all per director Christian Stephanos last week.

Marching band, Stephanos said, is something that he wanted to grow in Alaska and on the Kenai Peninsula from the moment became the band director at Kenai Central and Kenai Middle School. In the Lower 48, he said, marching band is “huge.” Now, a few years into the effort, he sees his students and the community buying into it. The marching band is growing, and it’s adding to the football experience.

Students are excited, Stephanos said, and he’s working to acquire more instruments to put in their hands.

“They want to be there,” he said.

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This year’s marching band is the largest it has been since Stephanos took the reins, he said, double the size it was last year.

Each year, the band picks a new show, Stephanos said, often rooted in popular culture — like a “Top Gun”-themed show last season. Stephanos said that his students were interested in last year’s film “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,” and when he checked it out, he liked what he heard.

The show that the Kardinal marching band has performed at football games this fall, based on that movie, was largely arranged by Stephanos, though he and a band director in Wasilla traded some arrangement services and helped each other out without costing money to either of their programs.

The show has grown, Stephanos said, as the students have gotten engaged with it, adding sound effects and voices. This year sees the return of the color guard to Kenai’s marching band, and Stephanos said they play characters from the films as part of the show. Students have had the music to practice and work with all summer, and arrived at an exhibition ahead of the start of the football season in August with a show that stretches across movements and features quotes from the film.

Looking farther into the future, the band is also now undertaking a major fundraising effort to get to Indianapolis for the Bands of America Grand National Championships at Lucas Oil Stadium. That competition, Stephanos said, is the biggest marching band competition in the country, and it hasn’t seen an Alaska team compete in eight years.

“If we’re gonna go, we might as well go big,” he said.

That experience will give students the chance to meet other bands from other parts of the country, as well as to prove that Kenai students and Alaska bands can compete on a national stage, Stephanos said.

For information about fundraising efforts like donation drives, car washes and other performances, find “Kenai Bands” on Facebook.

Reach reporter Jake Dye at jacob.dye@peninsulaclarion.com.

The Kenai Marching Band debuts their new routine based on “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes” during an exhibition at Kenai Central High School on Friday, Aug. 16, 2024. (Jake Dye/Peninsula Clarion)