Marching Lions Seek to Replace 'Ghetto' Uniforms

The year is 2003, and D.J. McConnell is a senior at , where he is also a member of the school’s marching band. The uniforms he and his band mates wear are decent, but they’re not the greatest.

Five years later, he became the director of the Marching Lions. It was then he thought to himself: Surely my students aren’t wearing the same uniforms I wore. They can’t be the ones that were bought in the mid-1990s. 

“I didn’t think they were the original uniforms from when I was in high school until I researched it and they definitely are,” he said.

Since McConnell became band director in 2008, he and his students have been on a mission to replace the now decade-and-a-half-old uniforms, which have exceeded their projected lifespan by about five years. But the financial hill they’ve had to climb has been a bit steep. 

The cost of a set of 75 uniforms—jackets, bibber pants, hats, plumes and gauntlets—is $23,000. In McConnell’s three-year tenure, the group has turned over $11,500 to a uniform company with some extra money in the bank. 

The remaining cost: $8,000.

“We’ve been working really hard to get them,” said Dontevian Toler, a 16-year-old junior tuba player.

The Marching Lions’ fundraising efforts have included carwashes, selling pizza, coke, suckers and cookie dough and more. And the speed at which they’ve been working to raise money has been kicked into high gear because of the shape of their current uniforms. McConnell said one student even got a staph infection from one.

“The problem is most of them have been altered so many times that they’re just falling apart,” he said. “It makes them feel really bad about what they’re doing. If you don’t look good, you don’t feel good.”

One of 17-year-old Molly Mayhue’s main complaints is the “horrible” smell that emanates from the uniforms. 

“And every time we send them to the cleaners, they come back and they smell even worse,” the trumpeter said, adding that the scrapping of some uniforms for others is also causing wardrobe issues. “Somebody had to cut a piece off another uniform to put (on mine) and it looks ghetto.”

Some pants and hats have been replaced over the years, McConnel said, but it makes the most financial sense now to knock out an entire band’s worth of complete uniforms.

To help reach that goal, 15-year-old Sarah Kutzner, a freshman trumpet player, has been selling, selling, selling.

“It’d be greatly appreciated if we could have something new,” she said, “so other schools won’t be like: ‘That’s their uniforms?’”

The band’s goal is to have new garb by the start of next school year. If you would like to donate to the cause, you can call the school at 770-651-6800 or contact McConnell here.

“It’d feel like we’ve all done something together,” said Dontevian, who will be a senior next year. “It’d just be our big family mission that we all accomplished.”