Hey Alumni!
Time flies when you’re having fun. So unsurprisingly this year went by in a flash. It feels like it was just yesterday we were at Toledo, screaming our heads off as our team finished off Michigan State. Or in Lake Placid, watching our team defeat two teams we thought would be the end of us. Or in Foxborough, watching the first Cornell NCAA champs crown themselves in Gillette Stadium. Or at First Night, watching all the freshmen find their way into the band center and diving head first into both marching and pep. Or even at MSG, performing our pregame and enduring a depressed bus ride home.
It’s been a hell of a year and I’m incredibly grateful to have served as Pep Band Manager throughout it. There were ups and downs, things I wish I did better and things I think the band did spectacularly well despite serious challenges. Like I said, we managed to make it all over the northeast and beyond, even being able to watch Cornell’s first NCAA championship in fifty years, with a band of alumni and students celebrating in Gillette stadium. We had one of the busiest playoff seasons in a while and we managed to get to nearly everything, and for that I have to be grateful to athletics and BRBAA, who helped organize the funding and last minute organization of such crazy endeavors, along with all the alumni who joined us on the road.
The fall is always a little more relaxed for Pep, but we still managed to get involved. The Pep Board has been hard at work, and this year the social chairs organized a social with the Women’s Hockey team, only for us to turn around and support them by traveling to Colgate. We also managed to attend a variety of spirit events, and even had a small playoff run with Men’s Soccer. We capped it off with MSG, where 75 band members traveled to New York to perform at Red Hot Hockey. Despite our tragic loss, I was still happy to see how many people attended and how strong the band looked.
As my term comes to a close I get to watch the band rally for the spring as hockey season begins to swing into high gear. I feel honored to see how passionate the band has become, to the extent that a “skeleton band” feels like a thing of the past. With my successor elected I’m preparing for a nice retirement semester, watching as the band that has given me so much grows even more. To that end, I want to say thank you to all of the people who have helped me along the way, and I hope you continue to enjoy and support the Pep Band!
Go Red!
Tommy ‘26