Members of the Cincinnati Tradition perform Tuesday evening at Spartan Thunder.
Dean Brown | The Lima News
LIMA — Spartan Thunder, the Drum Corps International competition rang loud in Spartan Stadium on Tuesday night. Teams from as far away as San Diego, California and as close as Cincinnati performed intricate marching routines for those in attendance.
Michael Ley, when he took over the leadership of the music booster program in the Lima City Schools, was looking for something different for a fundraiser. He found something when he reached out to Drum Corp International, which was looking for some more host sites for its competitions.
Ley explains how things came about. “Working with DCI, they did a lot of the scheduling with the drum corps. On our end, it’s finding out some other things that have to be done logistically and stuff like that. Getting sponsors. But we’ve had a good team to do it.”
Asked about the most interesting part of planning such an event Ley shared that the most interesting aspect of the planning has been ticket sales. “The number of people coming from outside of our community. Drum corps has a large following and a lot of times when you talk to people about drum corps they know what they are. So bringing people from outside of this community has been interesting. Looking at ticket sales, our farthest away is from New York, New York, coming into our community for that day and evening. But I would say 95% of presale tickets are from outside of Allen County.”
The show had six drum corps participating. Cincinnati Tradition opened the show followed by Raiders from Princeton, New Jersey. Gold from San Diego, California participated right before intermission. After intermission, performances were by Southwind from Mobile, Alabama; Louisiana Stars from Lafayette, Louisiana and Legends from Kalamazoo, Michigan.
