STATE CHAMPIONS

When Sallisaw kicks off its district football game Thursday night against Hilldale at Perry F. Lattimore Stadium, there‚ll be a state champion on the field — at halftime.

For the fourth time in the past six competitions, the Sallisaw marching band has been crowned Class 4A state champions by the Oklahoma Bandmasters Association.

The 70-member band added more hardware to its trophy case Saturday at Edmond Santa Fe, de- feating bands from Fort Gibson, Blanchard, Oologah, Skiatook, Tuttle, Catoosa, Weatherford, Harrah, Woodward, Ada and Cushing.

“It‚s a great group of kids,” band director Geoff Webb said of the band. “We have some amazing kids at Sallisaw, and it‚s really fun to get to go places and show them off. I enjoy bringing home the hardware, but, man, these kids work and it‚s a great, great group of students that we have here.”

The Black Diamonds won back-to-back state titles in 2016 and 2017, and then duplicated the feat this year after winning in 2021. The band made the finals in 2018 and 2019, but there was no competition in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In Saturday‚s competition, the band was judged in three subcategories (or captions), winning all three:

• Music Performance — “just how the kids are playing,” Webb explained — which involves judges on the field listening to each member as they march, as well as a judge in the stadium pressbox seeing the entire band and evaluating the sound and the marching routine.

• Visual Performance, which entails “a judge who watches how the kids are marching, how the color guard is twirling and the marching they do and all the body choreography we add in is part of the visual caption.”

• General Effect is when three judges evaluate the entire package as a whole, which includes any type of emotional connection or what Webb calls “wow moments” when watching a marching performance, “where you‚re like ’Wow! That was pretty cool.‚” While the four state titles came under Webb, who has been at Sallisaw since 2013, he is quick to point out that the Black Diamonds have had championshipcaliber bands in the past, but that was before the OBA discontinued Class 4A and Class 5A schools competing in the same class.

“They used to combine 4A and 5A,” Webb explained. “Sallisaw had some really good bands in like ‚08, ‚09, 2010, but they had to compete against 5A. In 2021, that‚s when they split 4A off because it was just getting to the point where a 4A cannot compete with a 5A. It‚s very, very difficult.

“That‚s not to take away from [previous band directors]. Mr. (Brent) Evans and Mr. (Jeremy) Ford were both just amazing guys, amazing band directors, amazing people, just did an outstanding job when they were here and left us in pretty good shape when we took over. That‚s not to diminish anything that those guys did. When they were here, they were just remarkable band directors.”

Sallisaw‚s state championship band was coming off a solid showing the previous weekend at an invitational marching competition in Broken Arrow that featured bands from Oklahoma, Texas and Missouri. The Black Diamonds finished sixth in that competition, but defeated schools like McAlester, “which is a pretty goodsized 5A,” and Muskogee, “that‚s a 6A-I in Oklahoma, so that‚s a pretty big school, too,” Webb pointed out.

Sallisaw wrapped up its fall marching competition Tuesday in Oologah at the Oklahoma Secondary Schools Athletic Association‚s Regional Assessment. Webb said the event is not a contest, but rather “it‚s kinda like our test.” Instead of winning a competition, bands earn ratings from 1 (superior) to 5 (poor).