The Spirit Show!
- Jeremy Earnhart
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
One of the smartest things we ever implemented at L.D. Bell was the Spirit Show.
You can still find examples online dating back to 2007 — including the 2015 AT&T Stadium performance below, years after I left the program.
2015 L.D. Bell Band Spirit Show, AT&T Stadium
It was simple.
It was fun.
It took about 90 minutes to teach.
And the return on investment was enormous.
The goal was straightforward:
Create a high-energy, crowd-pleasing halftime production that involved every student in the program while simultaneously teaching the foundational systems of marching band.
The Spirit Show became all of the following at once:
A tangible work product on Day One of summer band
A tool for teaching how to read drill charts
A system for teaching rehearsal protocol and drill-learning process
A guaranteed halftime closer for the first football games
Pep rally and stands material
A playoff-ready production
A culture-builder
A confidence-builder
A crowd favorite
And perhaps most importantly:
Every student participated.
The First Time We Performed It
I remember standing in disbelief during the first Friday Night Lights performance.
The crowd stood up and clapped along to the pulse.
When the band hit the “Hey Song,” the stadium actually yelled:
“HEY!”
At that moment, something became crystal clear:
People want to engage with bands.
Audiences do not need sophisticated design layers and competitive nuance to connect emotionally. They respond to clarity, energy, confidence, participation, and school spirit.
The Spirit Show delivered all of that immediately.
Why This Matters
In highly competitive marching band environments, two realities often exist:
Not every student ultimately receives a competitive field-performance role
The competition production may not be complete until very late in the season
That creates a challenge early in the year.
At the first football games, many bands have only learned fragments of the show — perhaps part of an opener or half a ballad — which can lead to halftime performances that feel incomplete or anticlimactic.
The Spirit Show solved that problem overnight.
When the contest production was still developing, we could simply:
cadence to the block,
hit play,
and immediately deliver an engaging, complete halftime experience.
The principal loved it.
The football boosters loved it.
The crowd loved it.
Most importantly:
The students loved it.
Educationally, It Was Gold
What made the Spirit Show especially effective was that students learned marching fundamentals inside a highly rewarding environment.
In roughly 90 minutes, students learned:
how to read drill
how to float
how to move pathways
how to reset
how to dress forms
how rehearsal flow works
how to move with confidence and timing
Instead of learning these concepts in isolation, students learned them while performing music they recognized and enjoyed.
That dramatically accelerated buy-in and confidence.
By the time we transitioned into contest drill, the instructional language and rehearsal systems already felt familiar.
Structurally, It Was Extremely Simple
The design was intentionally achievable.
At Bell, the sequence looked something like this:
Begin in a block
Float 8 counts to spell BLUE
Play the “A” section of a pop tune (Louie Louie)
Return to block
Counter-motion slides
Float to spell RAIDERS
Play the “Hey Song”
Return to block
Do-si-do square movement
Float to spell LD BELL
Accelerando into the fight song
Applause
That was it.
Simple forms .Simple movement. Maximum effect.
Smaller groups could adapt this idea easily:
GO
WIN
school initials
mascot name
single-letter forms
The concept scales beautifully to almost any program.
One Final Thought
Directors sometimes assume everything must be maximally sophisticated to be meaningful.
I’m not sure that’s true.
Some of the most impactful things we ever did were:
clear,
joyful,
achievable,
inclusive,
and unapologetically entertaining.
The Spirit Show checked every box.
And honestly?
People love spirit shows.
Puppies. Kittens. Spirit Shows.
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