By Kyle Garratt

The Alumni

Do you ever watch the halftime show of a football game and wonder how all the members work together? Maybe you wonder how The Ohio State University spells the word "Ohio" with moving people or how University of Tennessee students form a large "T."
For the past 30-plus years, displays such as these have been achieved by high school marching bands through the help of Wayne Manzanares, chairman of marching affairs for the Colorado Bandmasters Association. Manzanares coordinates all the marching contests in Colorado, including the state championship. He was headed toward this position almost his entire life.
"I told my dad when I was in fourth grade that I wanted to be a band director and he didn't believe me," Manzanares says. "He said, ‘Oh yeah, here's a fourth-grader just talking.' "
But Manzanares' father bought him a trumpet, one of about 20 instruments he plays. Manzanares claims to play six instruments well. He's played drums and bass guitar in bands and has recently taken up the mandolin. During his sophomore year at Centennial High School, he was taking music more seriously than most.
"About halfway through high school, I realized that if I was going to be a band director and I was going to get prepared for college, I could not go to that high school. They had a very small band program," Manzanares says.
So he enrolled at the private Holy Cross Abbey School in Canon City for his final two years of high school. He went on to earn a bachelor's degree in band and choral studies and a master's in music theory from Adams State in Alamosa. Manzanares says his college education taught him to play his main instrument, the trumpet, very well, all the other marching band instruments well and some music theory, none of which prepared him entirely for his first job as band director of Douglas County High School.
"I was really nervous, really young, but I learned with the kids. It was a weak band and a weak band director, but we grew up together and got to be a pretty good-sized band," Manzanares says. "It really defined what I was at a later date because I learned so much. There's so much to know as a band director. You're teaching jazz band, you're teaching concert band, you're teaching marching band, you're the director of the orchestra for the musical. Then there's the band boosting organization, the financial side where you're fundraising and all of those hats that you wear that you don't learn anything about in school. Because the program was so young, it was good for me to learn with them. If it had been a big-time program and young band director like me, I might have bombed out."
Halfway through his 12-year tenure at Douglas County, Manzanares was heading the largest band in Colorado high schools. The band he took over had 39 members, and when he left it had 280, or about a third of the school's student body. The average high school band makes up about 8 percent of the student body, according to Manzanares. The culmination of this tenure was when Douglas County was invited to perform in front of 1.6 million people at the Tournament of Roses Parade in 1981.
After transforming the Douglas County program, Manzanares went on to Ponderosa High School, where he won six state championships in eight years. It took 20 years of 14-hour days for Manzanares to build a program out of nothing, create a dynasty, influence hundreds of kids and lose plenty of his hearing before he called it quits to take over as band director at Castle Rock Elementary School, in favor of shorter days and less-damaged eardrums.
He also took a position as the assistant entertainment director for the Denver Broncos, planning halftime shows using high school and college marching bands as well as booking acts to perform the national anthem. In 1991, he started his duties as chairman of the Colorado Bandmasters Association, serving as the self-described founding father of unifying and better funding marching bands around the state. He retired from Castle Rock in 2001.
"What I like most is paying back the organization for the opportunity that I had when I was a high school band director," Manzanares says. "I went to state championships and when I went there, the events were very well-organized and I was a recipient of that organization. Somebody did that job for me and now it's my turn to provide the same thing."
When Manzanares started working with high school bands in 1971, there was no uniform manner of judging competitions and several private organizations ran competitions. Now there is one way to judge competitions, the state championships are held at Invesco Field at Mile High and revenue for marching band events is up 600 percent since Manzanares joined the Bandmasters Association.
"Standing in front of a band and conducting a concert is an empowerment that you can't believe," Manzanares says. "When you're on stage, you don't worry about what's wrong, you just worry about what's right."