The northeast Ohio area has had its fair share of instrumental music groups thrive over the decades. One of those groups is Matrix Performing Arts, which has three groups that perform in different divisions of Ohio Indoor Performance Association (OIPA) and Winter Guard International (WGI).
One of the groups is Matrix 3, which performs in the Scholastic division of OIPA and the Independent A division of WGI. The drumline consists of high school students from across the northeast Ohio area. At the OIPA State Championships and WGI PIA Finals, the group received gold medals in their respective divisions after months of tedious work.
Hoover sophomore, William Wright performed for the group as a tenor drum player.
“M3 was a group of around 20 people,” Wright said. “It’s not about effort or if you’re trying, because in an ensemble with that many superdedicated people, everyone is trying and cares about what they’re doing, It’s about doing the work and achieving what you need to do no matter what.”
It was a long and grueling season for Matrix 3, with auditions starting in November.
“Our head director, Rob Fergusson, stated at the beginning of the season he wanted every individual in the ensemble to improve from the start of the season to the end and he wanted nobody hiding at finals,” he said, “Meaning he didn’t want anyone fake playing hard parts of anything like that. The judges at competitions are very high so theoretically you could fake some stuff but that doesn’t do you any good so our director was very strict with that. We achieved that goal and ended with a very developed and amazing ensemble and nobody was hiding anything.”
Matrix 3 has been a subgroup for the Matrix Performing Arts since 2021. But had never had any Hoover members until this year. It is a much different climate than marching band.
“Everything is indoors so it can be challenging to hear each other inside a booming gym,” Wright said, “So with a drumline, it can get very loud. This is very different from playing outside in marching band where everything is dry and you can listen to each other easily. There was an extraordinarily high level of detail required in every single note, step, and even facial expression primarily because the judges can see every member and there aren’t a large number of members so every member matters a very high amount in our total score. I’m not saying it doesn’t matter in our marching band but it is super apparent with that few members, with around 25 in M3 compared to the over 160 in the Hoover band.”
Matrix 3 has finished in first place at OIPA finals before in 2022, leaving the framework for continuous success for the drumline. The 2024 group was in first place in their WGI division for the majority of the year but had faltered down the rankings come finals week.
“From our first regional competition in Michigan in March, we had been nationally ranked as first for our class for the entirety of the competitive season so for two months,” he said. “We were confident we had a chance of winning. The change in attitude was going into our prelims run at finals. We discovered that we were in third place by a significant margin, and we thought we weren’t going to win at that point. We all understood not everything is about winning but still that drove us to rehearse extremely hard for finals the next day.”
However, the group would shoot up the rankings on finals night, getting a large enough score increase to finish first place in their division at the WGI World Championships.
“It was genuinely shocking,” he said. “Our director, my parents, friends, or any of the members thought it was going to happen…After our finals run, we didn’t feel super fantastic so we thought there was no way we would’ve won but we were all still very proud of the work we put in to be there. During the awards, we were all completely blown away that we got first and it was just remarkable we ended up winning. It still feels unreal that it ended up happening and everyone was ecstatic because of it.”
The season may be over now, but the memories of the season will live on for an indefinite amount of time.
“My favorite memory from this season was by far in the tunnel that went out to our State Championship awards,” Wright said. “At the OIPA state championships, we were going against everyone in our division in the state which was only 2 other groups. We were all super proud of our run earlier that day and we were celebrating in the tunnel and there was music playing and it was overall a super good time.”
