The first big pep band trip came during the 95/96 school year. A surprised VU pep band, reinforced with Alumni and a Valpo high school student headed to Phoenix, Arizona in the middle of a snow heavy March in Indiana. Arizona did end up beating us, but the experience didn't leave the team or the band wanting more. Highlights of the trip included:

1. Hanging out with Kansas cheerleaders in the hotel pool, which was outside in the middle of March
2. Having Coach Drew buy the band ice cream
3. Being interviewed by reporters everywhere since this was a huge story in the area
4. The weird distinction that people suddenly had heard of Valparaiso (in whatever random pronunciation you want to use), because everyone back home were all rooting for us to upset #1 seed AZ.
5. Seeing the Chicago Cubs play a spring training game before catching our flight back.

   The following year, VU won the Mid-Con championships, which developed into a streak that would go on until the 2000/01 season. We traveled to Salt Lake City, Utah to take on the Boston College Eagles. The trip proved uneventful, so we focused on making fun of the BC mascot whose job appeared to be to flap his "wings" (hands) the entire length of the game

The 97/98 season made up for the uneventful nature of the previous post-season. The Men's team once again stamped its ticket to the NCAA at the Mid-Con tournament. We were becoming pros at pep rallies, victory celebrations, and such. A terrible snowstorm hit Northwest Indiana just as we were getting ready to go to Oklahoma City for the tournament. Once power was restored and the roads cleared, our Men's team barely caught a flight out. With flying out of the question for us, the pep band, it was suggested that if we really wanted to, we could try to make it there by bus. Sixteen plus hours later, we arrived in Oklahoma City having overcome any desire for personal space that we may have had as band or as cheerleaders.

At the game and with just 2.5 seconds left, Valpo had the ball at its own baseline. Jamie Sykes (who went on to play professional baseball) throws a baseball pass to Bill Jenkins just beyond mid-court, who passes mid-air to Bryce Drew, who drains a 3 pointer. This became known as "The Shot" or "The Pacer” you now hear about today. The band members were there to experience it and to celebrate.

While we had been away that first weekend before, the second weekend was an experience that was unforgettable. The band walked into the Kiel Center (now Savvis Center) in St Louis in the middle of the game before ours and received a standing ovation from the crowd. This was one of the coolest moments in pep band. Unfortunately, the result of the game was that Rhode Island put an end to Valpo's Cinderella run in the NCAA tournament. Nevertheless, Valpo fans refused to depart from the arena until the team would come back out of the locker room so they could applaud them one more time. While the 97/98 season is probably the biggest highlight around, there are a number of other fun trips that followed.

During the 98/99 season, Valpo was invited to the NABC Classic at the Hoosier Dome in Indianapolis where they defeated South Carolina and Seaton Hall and although it meant two bus trips back-to-back to Indy, the band was there.

After stamping the ticket at the Mid-Con tournament yet again, we were off to sunny Orlando, Florida to take on Maryland who rudely ended any ambitions for the "young guns" (as the team that year had named itself) and to have a repeat of the previous season.

The 99/00 season which featured Y2K and other craziness, took us to Cleveland, Ohio for the NCAA first round where we lost to the eventual national champion, Michigan State.

The 2000/01 season saw us taking a breather as Southern Utah felt they ought to take a stab at the NCAA tournament as well. The Women Take Charge:

While the pep band did not originally play for Women's games, we started playing for conference games in 96/97 and all games in 97/98.

By the 01/02 season, our ladies had made it into an annual tradition to make it to the Mid-Con final. However, we lost the game and had to see another team go to the NCAA tournament

The 2001/02 season featured the ladies playing great basketball which was receiving notice here and from the often ranked opponents they were playing. So when they dropped yet another heart breaker at the Mid-Con tournament, many felt they deserved a post-season appearance. While the NCAA tournament was not sympathetic to feature them as an at-large, the WNIT was willing to put the ladies up against Michigan in what they thought would be a short post-season appearance.

During this time, our Men's team returned to stamp its ticket for NCAA. Now the band faced a dilemma. There were two teams heading to post season games. Original plans for this scenario were to split the band and make two bands, but it proved more difficult than we thought. Our Men's team was placed in St. Louis to take on Kentucky and our Women were in Ann Arbor, Michigan. We came up with the idea that we could just take one band to two games; after all, the women were playing the day before the men.

With flying out of the question, we set out on a bus to Michigan to show up to an absolutely surprised and overwhelmingly grateful Women's basketball team. After many words of thanks, our ladies returned the favor by beating Michigan in front of a mostly empty arena and a Michigan band that seemed shell shocked by our enthusiasm and cheering. After the game, we packed back into our "home," the bus, and got underway for an overnight trip to St. Louis where we arrived just in time to eat breakfast before we had to play for the team send-off. Kentucky, which actually looked like a beatable opponent that year as they had been shaky most of the season, chose that moment to shine. We lost.

But wait ... the band season isn't over. We returned to our "home" and drove to ... Valpo. In what seemed to some of us as irony, we checked into a hotel in Valpo because the dorms were not open yet and relaxed for the first time in a number of days to refuel on energy to travel to Muncie for the WNIT second round where our ladies would take on Ball State. We once again made a surprise appearance (this time less to our team as to the stadium staff who apparently had failed to get the message that we were coming and scrambled to set up bleachers for us) and much to the chagrin of Ball State fans. We cheered our team to yet another victory. This time, the university felt this was a big enough event to put in a bid for the next round game. This resulted in probably the biggest ladies basketball game the ARC had ever seen as the ARC's lower seats were actually filled with fans. There was a student section and the band had both permission to exceed 30 players AND to use electronics (both unheard of in post season play). However, our Women lost and ended their WNIT run.

The 2002/03 season saw our Men's team being upset in the Mid-Con championship game by an obnoxiously ambitious IUPUI team, but not before our ladies secured their first ever ticket to the NCAA tournament. But suddenly our post-season appearances doubled as our Men's team received an invitation to play Iowa in the NIT in what would be Valpo's first ever nationally televised game. So before heading to West Lafayette, our travels took us to Iowa City, IA where our Men came awfully close to showing a hard-playing IOWA team why they should have been in the NCAA tournament rather than IUPUI. Unfortunately, IOWA disagreed in the end. Alas another bus took us to support our ladies for a rematch with the first ranked Purdue Boilermakers. Our ladies were hardly intimidated and gave Purdue the biggest run that a #1 seed has likely ever seen facing a #16 seed. The Crusader Pep Band was there to cheer for them.

In the 2003/04 season, our two teams got together and figured it'd be fun to have a joint victory celebration at the end of the Mid-Con tournament with Valpo sweeping the Mid-Con tournament in front of somewhat stunned auditorium. Fate would then present another challenge, sending the two teams so recently united by common achievements to separate places. The time of two bands had finally arrived with our Men heading to Seattle, WA, and our Women off to Minneapolis, MN.

After a lengthy evening of phone calls, we had two reasonable size bands and a group of swingers (get your mind of out the gutter). While the long desired match-up of VU vs. Gonzaga proved fatal for our Men, new challenges turned up for the band as we had to try to return a small group of the Seattle band to reinforce the troupe heading to Minneapolis. After lots of work by the Athletics department, we found a home for the swingers on a flight back to Chicago via ... no way you could guess this one ... Minneapolis. We made it back to Valpo with about 4 hours to catch a cat nap (and do some laundry) before getting on a bus to go back to Minneapolis (where we just came from).

While our ladies fought hard, the Lady Gophers proved too tough in the end and brought about the end of the pep band season, signaled (with some rare exceptions) by the playing of the Alma Mater (I'm sure you've wondered why that is in your book). Miscellaneous:

A side-note to the 2003/04 season: It featured the first ever Mid-Con tournament win of our volleyball team, and a small brave group of us piled in a car to cheer them on as they played Nebraska in East Lansing, MI. We lost but are anticipating next year, for it looks like they will do it again.

A new first and history in the making in the 2004/05 season is that for the first time since the inception of this organization in its current state, Phi Mu Alpha (Men's music fraternity), the organization out of which the pep band was originally grown, has relinquished leadership of the group. Melanie Simpson is the first director who is not a member of one of the music fraternities on campus. How will the story continue, it's your turn to find out if you want to, but I hope you realize from what we have written that the ride is always worth it. The number of people who can say "I was there" is small, and most of them pay a lot of money for that privilege, whereas in the band ... they pay you to be there. Prior to Mid-Con changing its rules forbidding bands to travel to rival schools, we would occasionally travel to rival schools in the area. At one of these games when visiting Chicago State, we earned the honorary title "Valparaiso University rocking Pep Band" from their stadium announcer who left little doubt in his introductions of us that he thought us to be the main attraction (it must be noted that Chicago State has since become a far more competitive opponent).

During the 1993/94 season, the pep band comprised of 8-10 people who thought that having some music during a basketball game would be cool. They brought all their own instruments, drove themselves everywhere the band went, and stood on the floor where the student section bleachers are today. Through the work of a lot of very dedicated people and many sacrifices made by people before you, we are considered an attraction by quite a few people in the crowd. We have a repertoire that few pep bands on our level or levels above us can match. We support the full home schedules of 4 teams, we receive travel expenses to post-season tournaments, the band owns instruments and other equipment, directors receive a stipend for the additional time they spend organizing and running things behind the scenes, and we have remained a student-run organization against several attempts to the contrary, thus giving us a lot of extra flexibility. This enables future music educators to have a great place to practice their skill at leading an ensemble as directors. We now have 258 people on the pep band list, and many of the people in pep band have become friends that have outlasted college.

Information compiled by Simon Kissler, Scott Paukner, Ben Dickmann, Dan Kenning, Andy Westbrook, and Tammy Harrell. Edited by: Marilyn Simpson