Once a year, Rio Americano’s world-renowned band program spends a day playing music nearly non-stop, inviting students from Rio and schools all around the Sacramento area to visit and listen to their music.
This event, Playathon, is the program’s biggest event of the year, and serves as a fundraiser and community outreach event. This year is the 42nd Playathon, as the program had to take a year off due to COVID. According to band director Josh Murray, this is the second year that the event has been completely back to normal.
Long before the event takes place in early November, the band community members begin to prepare. They hold “pledge parties” in which band members walk through their neighborhoods playing music, asking for donations.
Rio band also takes time prior to Playathon to reach out to feeder elementary and middle schools around the area, inviting them to attend and even play with the band itself.
This year’s Playathon theme was video games.
The music started before the school day, with the brass band beginning their performance around 7:30 am. Throughout the day, Rio’s concert and jazz bands, as well as Smamble and brass band, performed for students and staff in the Performing Arts Center and around campus.
After school, student and parent volunteers run a carnival with games and activities for visiting families, as the music continues in the PAC. Later in the evening, the All Play begins, where all of the band members gather to celebrate the senior class, followed by a dance for the musicians.
Rio’s jazz bands are regularly ranked among the best in the nation, and have been finalists in the nationwide Essentially Ellington Jazz Band Competition and Festival 11 times in the past 20 years.
Although Playathon involves a lot of fundraising, it is also an important event for the community, both for surrounding schools and families as well as Rio band itself.
“We often tell the freshman band students that they are not truly Rio band members until after Playathon,” band director Mitch Evett said.
