Redline at the 2009 WGI Percussion World Championships
Redline: Success From The Start
Aug 19, 2009
By Michael Boo
Martin Harrison is the founder and director of Redline, a 2nd year WGI Independent World Class line that made World finals in its first year. In 2008 the line placed 10th and this season moved into 5th. The following is Martin’s own words.
I’ve had a long history in the marching arts, both teaching and performing. I’ve always loved what the activity does for performers and audience members alike, and since aging out of DCI in 2002 I’ve been looking for ways to get seriously involved again. The biggest hurdle has always been structuring that involvement in such a way that it’s compatible with my career at Texas Instruments. I found pretty early on that even the weekly rehearsal schedule of high school band programs was impossible for me to keep up with.
I moved to Michigan about five years ago for my job with TI and once I got settled, immediately started looking around for teaching opportunities. In my first job with Milford High school I met the person who would eventually start Redline with me, Andy Ebert. At the time he was serving as the Visual Caption Head/Designer for Milford High School, but soon thereafter moved on to a similar role with Plymouth Canton High School and is now the Assistant Band Director of West Bloomfield High School as well as the Visual Caption head of Carolina Crown. After teaching with Andy for a few years, we started tossing around the idea of starting an independent organization. I always had a huge respect for Andy’s ability to create great shows and performers, and once we enlisted the talents of Jonathan Ovalle to write the music for our first year, it put the pressure on me to create an environment where Jonathan and Andy had the freedom and tools to be successful.
I spent the next year and a half building the organization financially. A lot of people have asked me about this stage of the process, and understandably so, because in my experience it’s by far the hardest challenge in getting any new business off the ground. Sadly there is no secret I’ve found, just a lot of leg work by me, the staff, my family, and some of my close friends. We spent many weekends just walking around local shopping areas trying to drum up community support and solicit donations from anyone who didn’t shut the door in our face.
Surprisingly the largest early money maker we had was a letter writing campaign geared at getting the organization up and running. We sent out over 400 letters to anyone we could think of. Friends, co-workers, acquaintances who were known supporters of the arts, family, EXTENDED family, and even local business owners of the places we frequented. The response was astounding. Those family members, friends, and business owners in Southeastern Michigan who contributed in the beginning deserve a huge amount of credit for the success of Redline. Without those people we would have never made it to auditions.
In addition to the community support, we were lucky to get some great sponsors early.
Dynasty, Evans, Sabian, M&I Dancewear and Innovative Percussion were all extremely helpful in getting Redline off the ground. Their experience in indoor not only proved valuable from a logistics and business perspective, but the reps offered up their own personal lessons to help me in becoming a better director as we struggled through our first years in the activity. I simply can’t thank them enough.
After our first year we picked up Paul Rennick of University of North Texas and Phantom Regiment, and Mark Reynolds of Dynasty, to join with Andy in developing the “Sculpted” show. The three of them did a phenomenal job in creating a show that was novel, appropriate to challenge our members, and keeping with what we want Redline to be in the activity. Even now as I watch the DVD I’m amazed at their ability for innovation. Not to mention our members’ abilities to get past the tights and ballet shoes and put on an inspiring performance!
I think it’s fair to say that the membership and the interactions I get to have with them is the best part of my job as director. Their maturity and dedication constantly amazes despite the overall young age of the group relative to the groups they’re competing with. In 2008 nearly every member in the line was still in high school, and this past season our average age was still just 18. We had only 1 age-out in the battery, and only 4 total age-outs in a membership of 56.
Due to the relative “newness” of World Class to both the members and staff at the time I think it’s fair to say we were all extremely excited to make finals our first year out. When we started Redline we intended it to be Open Class at least for the first year, but we underestimated the amount of great talent in Southeastern Michigan. We figured in order to challenge the members and ourselves it was important to give World Class a shot, but candidly we had no idea where we would end up. This year it was easy to see that a lot of groups were making large improvements early on and it was going to be a tough competitive year for World Class. I would have been happy with any improvement over last year, and I was ecstatic for the kids and parents when we did as well as we did in prelims.
Because of how well things have gone for Redline competitively over the past 2 years I think we’ve set a precedent that will be very hard to continue. Right now the only goal we have for next season is to focus on the things we didn’t do well this year and try to make them better. Aside from getting to see all the vets and parents again at auditions, I’m most excited for the addition of some great new staff members who have just come off a very successful season with Carolina Crown Drum and Bugle Corps. All the details are on our website!
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