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Published: Friday, Dec. 21, 2012 / Updated: Friday, Dec. 21, 2012 11:08 AM

Cougar band alumni plan reunion

YORK -- 

Jennifer Wix Sexton remembers good times as a trumpet player in the York Comprehensive High School band.

During her student days in the early 1990s, the band marched in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City and in a New Year’s Day parade in London. Her senior year, the Cougar band won a state marching band championship for the first time.

Sexton — who graduated in 1995 and later married high school sweetheart Eddie Sexton, a tenor sax player who graduated a year earlier — is one of several people planning a multi-year band reunion so they can share old memories.

“I’m trying to make this a huge deal,” said Sexton, 35, a sixth-grade teacher at York Intermediate School, “because I don’t know if we’ll ever do this again. And it’s never happened before.”

Sexton is working with Connie Grantham, a former assistant director of the York band, to organize a reunion for students, parents and others linked to the band. They are focusing on the years 1989 to 1996 — when Granthan and former director Matt Brown led the band — although Sexton said anyone associated with the York band is welcome to attend.

The reunion is planned for May 11, 2013 at Spring Lake Country Club in York, Sexton said. Videos are being compiled into DVDs to be played during the reunion, she said.

Brown, now an assistant superintendent with the York district, has been assisting with the reunion plans. “I think it would be a great idea,” Brown said. “Those were some great years with a lot of students and it would be very exciting to get the ones we can get together back together.”

Brown took the band on a lot of adventures. They performed in a Liberty Bowl halftime show in Memphis, he said, and made a commercial for the New Year’s Day event in London, which included a celebration in Trafalgar Square.

Brown said he still hears from former band students. “Every once in a while I run across a student from that time and we’ll sit down and talk,” he said. “We had some great times.”

Sexton said one of the band alumni, Stephanie Jonas, is a cake maker who is creating a theme cake to represent events that occurred during each of the seven years from 1989 to 1996.

Grantham, now an assistant director with the Nation Ford High School band in Fort Mill, said the organizers plan to gather a lot of memorabilia from those years. “What we have planned is very similar to a high school reunion,” she said.