Fountain Valley Royal Regiment has its coronation with marching band title
Rosxel Ludovice picked up a trumpet for the first time in the sixth grade at Masuda Middle School.
For as long as he could remember, the draw to band and to the performing arts had been about the music itself.
Playing music is an artistic expression of oneself. Take Ludovice, for example, who still finds time to play “Star Wars” sheet music during his side sessions.
What Ludovice, 17 — now a senior and a section leader at Fountain Valley High — did not realize was how much being part of the school band would come to be defined by the collective experience.
“It’s the connection you have with everyone in the band,” Ludovice said. “That is what you remember.”
The class of 2026 is the first to experience four full seasons of marching band since the coronavirus pandemic. The Royal Regiment, as the band is called at Fountain Valley High, has been a top performer.
Fountain Valley had its crowning moment when it won a 27-team competition for the Division 3A title in the California State Band Championships Southern California Division on Nov. 16 at Capistrano Valley High in Mission Viejo.
“At first, it was a feeling of disbelief because for all of high school, we’ve come short, second place two years in a row to being division champions,” Ludovice said. “After my upperclassmen graduated, when I came into a position of leadership, all I wanted to do was make it up for them and win a division championship before I graduated.”
The Royal Regiment then placed second to Delano Cesar E. Chavez in the Division 1-3 combined state finals the following week at Bolsa Grande High in Garden Grove.
Among the 16-team field for bands with 70 members or less, half the competing schools were from Orange County — Aliso Niguel, Capistrano Valley, Laguna Hills, Rancho Alamitos, La Quinta, Bolsa Grande and Westminster.
State champion Woodbridge headed another five county teams in the Division 4-6 finals, a group that also included El Toro, La Habra, Sunny Hills and Marina.
Haruka Koyama and Thomas Hartman are the current drum majors for the Royal Regiment. The field show was “Appassionata,” and last year’s was “Radiance,” both of which Jackson Lai, the school’s instrumental music director, has played a big part in writing.
Sophomore Avé Acosta, 16, had two older sisters in color guard who helped shape her path. She recalls pretending to make her own shows in her room, using brooms to replicate flags.
“Appassionata” was a four-movement show, but Acosta especially felt an element of empowerment when performing with the instrumental music used in one of singer Adele’s songs playing behind her.
“We were told that it was supposed to be like painting,” Acosta said. “We were painting, and we used orange silks, and color guard was supposed to represent the fire. During our ballad, we used the big, blue swing flags to Adele’s ‘Set Fire to the Rain.’ … When the trumpets went blaring behind us, we’re like, ‘Oh yeah. Yeah, we know what we’re doing.’”
The coronavirus pandemic brought its own set of challenges for marching bands. Competition division requirements were reduced concerning the number of members.
Lai has relied on a culture of encouragement and recognition to bring about enthusiasm within the program. A state divisional title should help reverse a trend of declining numbers.
“Hopefully, more and more people join, now that the program is gaining more traction again,” Ludovice said.
“We have to be positive and motivate them and encourage them to be able to do it,” Lai added. “One thing I found that has been a challenge is that attention spans have been just a hair shorter [since the pandemic]. … It does seem a little frivolous that we have to encourage the students to do something that they should come in wanting to do, but I think it’s still an art form that needs to be nurtured and developed.
“As teachers, we have to sort of propel that a lot more. I think COVID definitely didn’t help with the online learning, where if a student checks out, they just turn off their camera and go take a nap. It’s slowly trickling away, but I do feel like the remnants of it have been quite everlasting these past few years.”
Band class has been making an early impression on its newcomers. Percussion captain Ema Terada, 17, a junior marimba player who is in charge of the front ensemble, said a core memory came in her freshman year.
“I never did band in middle school, nor did I do a sport, so I didn’t know what it felt like to be with so many people and have something that we all work for,” Terada said. “I remember after we performed our final show, we have a tradition called ‘senior circle,’ where we group up and light a candle, and all the seniors light all the underclassmen’s candles.”
Enzo Oviedo, 17, a junior percussionist who plays bass drum, said it is a moment that has moved him to tears.
“They basically say, ‘This is my spark. I pass it on to you,’” Oviedo said. “It’s really emotional. That is probably my favorite memory.”
Freshman Taylor Lam, 15, had her interest captured by color guard just before high school, and that summer, she found herself marching with the Barons in their annual appearance at the Fourth of July parade in Huntington Beach.
“It was actually when I was transitioning from eighth grade into high school,” Lam said of her introduction. “They had this assembly for students to go to [and] check out different sports. Color guard was there to put on a performance, and when I sat down and I watched them, that was when I truly realized that color guard is something that I want to be a part of.
“I just saw the way the flags spun around, the different colors of the silks, how the rifles would spin around in the air, and how the catches were so clean. I thought that’s something I would like to put effort into.”
The Royal Regiment also played in the Pearl Harbor Memorial Parade on Dec. 7, and Lai intends to take the band to Washington, D.C. next year to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States in the nation’s capital.
“It helps students really connect the dots as to why we perform music and the importance of music in history,” Lai said. “With all of the experiences that we’re giving the students, I think that they’re able to connect the dots. They’re able to go to Pearl Harbor and understand all the sacrifices that were made, so that they can have this experience.
“In a way, they can give back through their music performance, to honor those that have come before us, those that have sacrificed their lives for us all to be here.”
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