The Pride of Metuchen’s Competitive Expansion

The Metuchen High School Marching Band has led a highly successful competition season this October, which makes up the bulk of their season with five of their eight scheduled competitions. These include shows at JFK High School, Somerville High School, Toms River High School North, Robbinsville High School, and a stadium show in Hershey Park, Pennsylvania. 

The band’s presentation for the 2025-2026 season is titled “The Truth About Water,” and tells the story of the destructive yet nurturing nature of water through combinations of various musical selections from artists such as Jane’s Addiction and Joni Mitchell. The show features complex arrangements, stunning visuals, and provides for an overall immersive and fascinating experience. 

The band has historically participated primarily in smaller, local shows within Tournament of Bands, a competitive circuit which operates within the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern United States. However, beginning in the 2024-2025 season, and developing more this year, the band has begun to expand their competitive interests due to collective feelings of having ‘outgrown’ only participating in these smaller shows. USBands, a competitive circuit that operates nationally, hosts an annual Championship show at Metlife Stadium in New Jersey, which the band has often participated in during past seasons as a kind of victory lap for their respective local successes. In the 2024-2025 season, though, incentive to participate shifted, as the band decided to attend one other USBands show at Robbinsville High School in order to accommodate themselves with the judges and the circuit to hopefully boost their competitive chances at Metlife Stadium. This trend has continued into this season, as the band attended three USBands competitions prior to Metlife Stadium, and has seen a growth in scores among this circuit. On September 20, the band scored a 70.0 overall score in the USBands competition at Edison High School, and moving into late October they scored an 85.3 at Robbinsville High School on the 25th. 

This competitive transition presents an overall greater speciality in this year’s season than ones past. The band’s ability to improve and hold stable scores in a relatively unfamiliar circuit reflects not only the collective talent of the band but also their adaptability and dedication. In recent years, the band had experienced a kind of stalemate within Tournament of Bands, and their shift into USBands has been characterized by their fast improvement and understanding of the more difficult standards. This, to the band, represents a new meaning of success, one which more effectively demonstrates the raw collective talent and its application on a much grander scale. The Pride of Metuchen, while always considered successful in competition, have now had perhaps their most influential season yet. Their competitive branching out is developing the program into something larger to fit the growing ability and dedication exhibited by each member and the ambitions of the band’s directors.