West Charlotte High band’s trailer vanished. Big shows of support sprung up in its place.
It’s not even three months into the year, and 2025 is already proving to be one of the most rewarding ever for West Charlotte High School’s marching band.
In February, the Marching Lions were voted “Best Marching Band” in the state of North Carolina via an online poll hosted by HighSchoolOT, a high school sports media outlet under the umbrella of Raleigh TV station WRAL. Then on Tuesday morning, the band scored an even bigger prize, courtesy of the Lovin’ Life Music Fest: a $10,000 donation; tickets to the May 2-4 festival in uptown Charlotte for every member of the band; and to top it all off, an opportunity for the Lions squad to perform on stage during Lovin’ Life.
The band has been a positive force in the community for years, with West Charlotte High director Adam Sobers telling CharlotteFive that it routinely fields requests to perform at award shows, presentations, conferences and birthdays. The event that inspired the festival to give his kids this gift, however, was a negative one.
As the new high school complex was being built in 2021, the band trailer was relocated to an area near the track toward the back of the construction site. And one day, it just disappeared.
Fortunately, Sobers says, it was empty. But “it’s a mystery as far as exactly what happened to it. Over the summer, I’m gone, I’m at home, but I come back one week randomly, and the trailer is just missing, and nobody has any answers. Nobody knows what happened. We already don’t have a travel budget or an operating budget for band programs. So we have to raise all the funds through fundraising and community efforts.
“Adding that expense to already (significant) expenses ... it wasn’t a good thing.”
The following year, a local nonprofit called Jane’s Fund — which raises money to support a mission that includes creating “educational opportunities for children that might not otherwise have them” — started working with West Charlotte High to try to address needs at the school.
Jane’s Fund staff eventually heard about the band’s missing trailer, and over this past winter raised the roughly $8,000 needed to order the Marching Lions a shiny new one wrapped in school colors. (It’s currently in production.)
Meanwhile, Lovin’ Life festival director Gregg McConnell caught wind of both the “Best Marching Band” honor and the trouble with the trailer from a friend of his — who just so happens to be the brother of WCHS principal Paula Cook. Because the music fest’s mission includes a desire “to give back to the community and local artists,” McConnell says, his team came up with the idea to support the West Charlotte band even further.
In his remarks to the band members at the school on Tuesday, McConnell said: “We know that dreams start in places like this and in organizations like this, and hopefully one day ... you guys will realize your dreams.”
After McConnell spoke, Ken Reynolds of the Bojangles Foundation pledged an additional $1,000 to the WCHS band.
And in the end, Sobers summed up his reaction to the various shows of support with just one word: “Unbelievable.”
This story was originally published March 19, 2025 at 6:00 AM.
