Lisa Blodgett, band teacher at Majestic Elementary Arts Academy in West Jordan, marched with a group of 349 other school band directors in the 2026 Rose Parade held Jan. 1. She was one of seven directors from Utah among the group with representatives from all 50 states, Canada, Mexico and Costa Rica invited to perform with The Band Directors Marching Band in the famous parade.

She said it was a lot of work to get prepared, memorizing five tunes and practicing marching, which she hadn’t done for a long time.

“Marching in a parade and just walking down the streets is not so bad, but when you're trying to play an instrument and breathe and hold your instrument at the right angle, that actually takes some coordination,” she said. “Walking and playing at the same time also isn't the same as standing and playing.”

The theme for this year’s parade was “The Magic in Teamwork,” which was fitting because all of the band members had to prepare and rehearse on their own to be ready to come together when they all finally arrived in California a few days before the parade.

“We had our first rehearsal and it immediately came together — people were prepared, they had parts memorized, and then we just put all the pieces together,” Blodgett said.

Blodgett and others also worked together to help decorate the Michael D. Sewell Memorial Foundation float honoring band directors which accompanied them on the route. She said the floats were “ginormous” and she was amazed at how beautifully detailed they were.

“It's a lot of work and people actually work on creating them for several months of the year, and then it takes a team of people that whole week before — like, all day into the night — to get the floats ready, because every surface of the float was covered with flowers or grains or seeds,” she said.

Her contribution was gluing flax seeds on the hair of one of the float’s characters, and rice on the rim of a giant drum. “It definitely made me feel more connected to it also, because then I got to see the end result,” she said.

Majestic Elementary band teacher Lisa Blodgett helps glue flax seeds onto the Michael D. Sewell Memorial Foundation float for the 137th Rose Parade. (Photo courtesy Lisa Blodgett)

She was one of the few who did. During the night before and the morning of the parade, rain fell on the uncovered floats.

“The poor floats were pretty washed down, and all the colors that were bright and vibrant on them kind of had been all mushed and had kind of run together,” Blodgett said. “They were still awesome, but the colors just weren't quite the same.”

The performers also got rained on for the first half of the parade but were grateful for the cooling effect of their wet uniforms during the sunny second half of the five-and-a-half mile parade route.

Blodgett said the whole experience was so much more than just marching in a parade. The Band Directors Marching Band is part of the Saluting America’s Band Directors Foundation, an organization honoring Michael Sewell, a longtime school band director who passed away. It was established by his widow Karen, and invites band directors to get involved in community service projects and performances before, during and after the parade.

While in Pasadena for the parade, band members participated in a service-through-music project, providing a donation and a performance at a Christmas Light event benefitting families who were impacted by last year’s Southern California wildfires. Some of the band members joined with other bands to honor first responders at another community event. Others, including Blodgett, were part of a video project in which 101 band teachers recorded themselves playing their part of a song and then all the individual recordings were compiled as one cohesive band performance. That project can be viewed on YouTube.

Blodgett said all of these experiences were also a good opportunity for her to remember what it is like to be in the student seat, which helps her be a better director.

“I get to be a student again, I get to have a director that's leading me, I get to be the one that's learning how to put my piece together with everybody else and be part of a team that way,” she said. “With my students all the time at school, I talk about ‘we are a team, and if we don't work together, then we don't get the desired product. In the end, we're not as strong as we could be.’ And so it was kind of fun to be part of that team.”

Her students were excited to see her very clearly in the center of the TV screen when she showed them the clip of the national news coverage of the parade.

“The excitement and enthusiasm they had when they saw me marching the parade was actually quite fun and hopefully inspirational for these kids,” she said.

Blodgett first learned of The Band Directors Marching Band while watching the 2022 Rose Parade hoping to catch a glimpse of some of her former students who were participating in other marching bands. When she saw the group of band directors, who were marching in the parade for the first time, she immediately knew she wanted to join them.