Sudden change of plans: Clover High trumpet ensemble shows they’re among nation’s best
The five teenagers from Clover were excited to simply compete among the best of best.
They had performed with elite high school and college competitors in Delaware and were headed to the airport for their flight home. Then Courtney Wyatt received a phone call. The boys would miss their flight. They had to compete in the finals.
So on April 2, the Clover High School Trumpet Ensemble went back to the University of Delaware for the finals of the National Trumpet Competition.
“We were driving and had to pull over and the boys asked ‘what do we do?’ I was like, ‘I guess we’re going to need to turn around,’” said Wyatt, the school’s associate band director. “So we we stopped, we reassessed, we bought new plane tickets, we extended our car rental and we had to move into a new hotel.”
They hadn’t planned on making it to the finals. The boys had planned to get home quickly because a few of them were performing in another competition with the high school’s indoor drumline.
And they thought making it to the finals in the Delaware competition -- an event 500 miles from home -- was beyond their reach, Wyatt said.
“For the little sleepy town of Clover, South Carolina, to have students even make it to the live round was a huge deal,” Wyatt said. “We were very excited to be in, you know, in the elite of these band programs that are what we would consider the best bands in the nation.”
The boys were intimidated, Wyatt said, but she told them to “play our hearts out and have a great time.”
Then the Clover boys heard the news they weren’t expecting to hear. They finished second. First place went to the Dallas (Texas) Youth Symphony Trumpet Ensemble.
“The students, the five boys themselves, lost our minds,” Wyatt said. “It was incredibly unexpected.”
“I think it’s really crazy,” said 17-year-old junior Logan Yorick. “None of us expected anywhere to get anything near what we just got.”
The boys won $750, which helped pay for their trip, Wyatt said. The band boosters helped pay with fundraising money.
Garner Boepple, 17, said placing second was inspiring.
“I think it’s very humbling to go that far to the Nationals,” Boepple said. “It’s a fantastic experience.”
The Clover High School Trumpet Ensemble had previously planned to go to the competition in 2020, but “the world shut down” due to Covid three days before they were supposed to leave, Wyatt said.
“So this was sort of our redemption year to … finally say that we made it out there and then for us to succeed and be second in the nation was just, it was it blew us all away.”
This story was originally published April 13, 2022 at 8:52 AM with the headline "Sudden change of plans: Clover High trumpet ensemble shows they’re among nation’s best."
