The name of the Tyrone Golden Eagle Marching Band’s 2019 show is “Nature’s Fury” and this past weekend Mother Nature put on its own show after the Golden Eagles left the field at their performance in Mechanicsburg.

A lightning storm caused a three hour delay that added to an already long day for the band that began at Tyrone High School at 8:00 am and did not end until about 1:00 am on Sunday.

On the field, the band performed well, placing second out of three schools that made up their class with a score of 79.02. Despite unseasonable heat and humidity, the marching band had very few difficulties with their show. The biggest glitch was a keyboard battery pack failed in the middle of the ballad. Overall, band Director David Hock was pleased with his band’s performance.

“I think most [of the] expectations I had were met,” Hock said, “We’ve still got some room for growth and we still have a couple of weeks to get better.”

However, soon after Tyrone left the field after performing “Nature’s Fury,” storm clouds rolled in over the horizon and the tremendous heatwave started to die down.

The rain started falling shortly after they got their equipment packed away. Many of the band members said “It was a curse. When we did Elements it rained as well.” 

For safety reasons, the performance was postponed for three hours and the bands were forced to retreat to their hot, humid buses. When lightning strikes a half-hour is added to the postponement, so the audience on the metal bleachers or the kids with metal instruments don’t get electrocuted.

The band finally left the competition at 10:15 pm, and did not arrive home until 1:00 am, making for an extremely long day.

The night was even longer for Drum Major Paige Webster, who stayed behind with her family to accept Tyrone’s second place trophy, which was not awarded until after midnight.

Despite the heat, rain, and delays, section leader Evan Snyder was pleased with the band’s performance.

“Wow. It was pretty good I enjoyed it it was an eye-opener there were a lot of new kids, but I think that they did pretty well,” said Snyder.

The next marching band performance will be the annual home show on Saturday, October 5 at Gray Field in Tyrone.