When De Soto High School’s marching band director Matt Bradford announced that this year’s theme was going to be Star Wars, there, of course, had to be a light saber battle.

The battle will first be performed for an audience at the Baker Marching Festival on Oct. 14. DHS students, faculty and the De Soto community will have a chance to see it the following Friday at halftime of the varsity football game.

A group of DHS students within the band had the idea for the battle and mentioned it to Bradford.

Bradford was in favor of the idea from the beginning, and the students took it from there.

“He’s [Bradford] given us free reign over how we do our fight and what all happens in it,” sophomore Ben Pickert said.

The group began practicing and working hard to create an intense battle scene.

According to senior Rhett Pierce, the group who battles practices every Monday from Seminar until band practice starts at seven p.m., every white day in Seminar, and every time they run through the show.

The boys divided the battle up by first deciding who would battle who, and in what order they would be defeated. Then, each individual group created their own scene.

“When we perfected that [the individual scenes] we added in spaces for us to have visual spins and fancy effects,” Pierce said.

The group has worked hard to create the scene and each member has a favorite part. “I’m dead most of the time, so I can’t really see a whole lot. Definitely when it gets down to the last two or three people it gets really cool to watch,” Pickert said.

While it may also be fun to do and cool to watch, the battle actually adds to the overall marching band show.

“It adds visual points. In marching, you get graded for GE points, or general effect points, and it [the light saber battle] adds to our general effect of the show,” Bradford said.

The battle will also take place during the band’s glow show on Oct. 23.

“I hope that the glow show is more twilight than pitch black, so that you can still see the light sabers really well, but we manage not to trip and fall,” Pierce said.

Either way, the show is likely to be exciting with all the hard work that the students have put into it.