THWACK! A short metal bat makes contact with a speeding baseball. The ball flies into the air and the small elementary schooler who hit it drops his bat and runs for first base, but the diamond isn’t where his heart wanted to be. Deep down inside he wanted to be on the field or on stage performing the magic of music.
After dropping out of baseball at the start of middle school Joseph Houk needed a new extracurricular activity. He always had a passion for music and a lot of his family played instruments, so music came naturally to him and joining the Rushe band made the most sense. Luckily for him he fell in love with it. Today, Joseph is a senior here at Sunlake preforming in our Wind, Jazz, and Marching Band Ensembles.
Last season, in October, Sunlake’s marching band, the Soaring Sound, wasn’t doing as well as they had hoped. “That was in the middle of the season, and we hadn’t fully locked everything in,” Houk explains. at the point the band had just finished preforming at the Tarpon Springs music festival and although they were grand champion of 3A, they still hid 2A and 1A to claim. Houk says “we were still cleaning stuff up and morale was really low so although we got fourth overall, I feel like we could have easily beaten the big bands there.”
And later in the season, on November 9th, he proved himself right. The Soaring Sound won grand champion in the entire FFCC right before Joseph and many other senior band members’ high school experience came to an end, adding another achievement to the band’s countless number of awards.
Band didn’t only teach Joseph how to play instruments like the Trombone, Euphonium, and the Baritone horn but more importantly he says it taught him how to “deal with a group and manage them, work with them and blend with them,” teaching him to “be the bigger person and take the responsibility.”
Although Joseph’s high school band career might be coming to an end, he says he is planning on going to the University of South Florida where he wants “to do band in the USF Jazz Ensemble and USF Wind Ensemble.”
Joseph says that, at the end of the day the best part of band has always been, “making music with [his] friends.” which makes me think of something that all of us need to be reminded of sometimes: in between the chaos of life, the most important thing is being able to make time for something you love, whether it’s people or a hobby or both.
