A Hundred Years of Spirit

A century of defining the Boston College student experience, both on and off the field.

The air is solid. It’s the kind of August heat that drops the world in a viscous jello, slowing time and and sapping the energy right out of you. You just moved the last box up to your room on Upper and flopped down onto the unmade bed. The sweat of your legs melts into the lukewarm vinyl mattress cover and you crane your neck towards the open window, gasping for breath. This is college. Somehow, the slightest tickle of a warm breeze touches your face, and with it comes the faint echo of a drum line pulsing across campus like the blood throbbing in your veins. You think nothing of it, but the echoes are coming from the Screaming Eagles, Boston College’s largest and loudest student organization.

______________

Across campus in the shadows of Alumni Stadium’s cavernous rafters, they have been practicing for weeks, training through the heat of August for the looming Football Season. Like most things at Boston College, this Screaming Eagles are committed to excellence, sacrificing the last days of summer to master the years arrangements and marching formations because, after all, they have to be perfect as the most visible campus group. With more than one hundred and eighty members to date, the Screaming Eagles are truly a force of nature. Over the last hundred years since their founding, the Boston College Screaming Eagles have not only demonstrated excellence in music production, but they have completely defined the student experience at Boston College by creating a spirit-filled environment of school pride both on and off the field.

The Screaming Eagles Band was formed in 1919, and it has since flourished from a meager handful of students to an impressive collection of the sharpest musicians from Boston College and the greater Boston area. The band, coed since 1969, has even expanded to include musical talent from various other universities like Emerson, Suffolk, and Berklee with it’s Partner Program. With this wide range of musical talent, the Screaming Eagles have grown to be one of the premier marching bands in the country.

_____________

It isn’t until mid-September when you first step into the baking hot student section of Alumni stadium that you recall the pulse of the drum line again. You hear them now in full force in all their precision and clarity. They beat like the pulse of the crowd, and the voices of the crowd begin to sing in unison,

“For Boston for Boston, we sing our proud refrain!”

Within a few seconds, the entire crowd is passionately asserting the chorus of the Boston College fight song, and the the voices of the crowd blend inextricably with the cacophony of sounds emanating from the band. Proud trumpets and strong tubas unite with the off-key shouts of the student body, and you start to feel like the drums are surely the heartbeat of the huge living organism that the student section has become.

“..For here we are all one and out hearts are true And the towers on the heights reach the heavens own blue”