September 20, 2001

Contact: Cindy Koester, KU Band Office, (785) 864-3024.

KU Marching Jayhawks to perform at Goodland's Sept. 21 homecoming game

LAWRENCE -- The University of Kansas Marching Jayhawks will give a special performance at 5:30 p.m. MDT Friday, Sept. 21, at Goodland High School before Goodland's 6:30 p.m. kick-off for their homecoming game with Atwood High School in northwest Kansas.

About 130 members of the KU band will perform a 30-minute concert before Goodland High School's 45-member band performs a pre-game show. The two bands will play the Star-Spangled Banner before kick-off.

KU's director of athletic bands Tim Oliver worked with Paul Garrison, director of the Goodland band, to arrange the KU performance. The KU band is making the stop en route to Boulder, Colo., for the Saturday, Sept. 22, KU-University of Colorado game.

From Goodland, the KU Marching Jayhawks will travel to Limon, Colo., to spend the night before continuing on to Boulder Saturday morning. At Boulder, in addition to playing for the KU team during the game, the Marching Jayhawks will also perform for a KU Boulder alumni chapter at the Millennium Harvest House.

Oliver said that arranging to have the KU band perform with Goodland's high school band "really is a result of the Wheat State Whirlwind tour that I took in May. I was impressed with what we saw and realized that the KU band doesn't perform in Western Kansas as often as we'd like to. So we decided to take the opportunity that our trip to Colorado presented.

"I understand there are a lot of people in the Goodland area with ties to KU. It's going to be fun to have the opportunity to play for them."

The annual Wheat State Whirlwind Faculty Tour of Kansas is sponsored by KU Chancellor Robert Hemenway to help faculty and staff learn more about Kansas and its residents. Many of KU's newer faculty members have adopted Kansas as their home but have had few opportunities to visit the home communities of their students.

The full Marching Jayhawks band consists of 200 KU students. Those attending the KU-Boulder game volunteered to do so, Oliver said.

Oliver moved to Kansas after earning a doctorate in music education at Florida State University at Tallahasee. He earned master's and bachelor's degrees from Truman State University in Kirksville, Mo.