The band is looking to win its first ever UIL State championship this year, beginning with the UIL Area competition at Memorial Stadium in Mesquite on Nov. 27.

Having advanced to Area from the Regional contest after getting sweepstakes ones, the band must make it past the preliminary round to finals and then place in the top four or five bands at Area to continue on to the State level.

“At Regionals, I felt like they performed as well as they could possibly have performed,” head band director Andy Sealy said. “I felt really good about it and felt like they worked hard to deliver a really solid performance for [the] amount of work they’ve had on all those materials.”

The UIL State marching band contest alternates years between 3A and 5A schools and 4A and 6A schools, so Hebron only gets the opportunity to compete for State every other year.

“I’ve done all of this stuff for four years and finally kind of figured it out,” senior drum major Lauren Baker said. “But I’m really just excited to have come this far and see what this show does because it’s not like anything Hebron’s done before.”

The past three times the band has attended the State contest, they placed second.

“There’s this big joke that there’s a ‘curse of the Hebron band’ where we always get second place,” senior mellophone player Rachel Gray said. “It’d be really nice to get first because it would just prove to ourselves not that we’re better than anyone else, but that all of our hard work is pushing us to a place where we want and deserve to be.”

The competition will be intense, with many other strong programs predicted to be in attendance.

“The competition is tough this year,” Baker said. “With us having so much rain [hindering our practice schedule] and South Texas not having so much, it’s going to be close between us and bands like CTJ [Claudia Taylor Johnson High School], but I guess we’ll just have to see when we get down there.”

Due to the new schedule for this school year and the rainy weather, the band just recently finished learning its show while other groups have been done for weeks.

“The weather’s got us behind in development,” Sealy said. “But it’s just a matter of how we overcome the challenges of these setbacks and how hard and how focused we can work in the rehearsal time we have to produce the show fully.”

If the band advances, the UIL State marching contest will be held Nov. 5-6 in San Antonio; if they don’t, they are still participating in the Bands Of America Super Regional competition there on Nov. 3. Gray said the band members are looking forward to the competition and the trip itself.

“I’m really looking forward to my room,” Gray said. “I’m rooming with some of my best friends in band, and I can’t wait to spend my senior year in San Antonio being around these people and doing what I love. It’d also be nice if we won: the cherry on top.”