Band in the Sand: Same dirt, new boots

For 10 years, Lakeland College’s agribusiness students have taken over the Equine Centre for a night, filling it with a sold-out crowd, country music, and a dirty good time for Band in the Sand. This year, the student organizers relied on a legacy left to them by past years’ students to pull off what they think was the biggest, best year ever.

“I felt a little bit of pressure going into it, seeing as it was the tenth year,” says Grace Dolman, project lead for Band in the Sand 2023. “But I knew the people I was working with would do a good job. As a class, we’re close and willing to help each other out and make this the best year ever. It was a lot of extra incentive.”

Band in the Sand began 10 years ago when New Holland gave Lakeland seed money to launch an event dedicated to raising funds for student agricultural clubs. The event is student-run, with students in charge of marketing, finance, logistics and promotion. Members of various agricultural clubs help at the event, and in 10 years they have raised nearly $500,000.

In the last decade, each class has built on the lessons learned in the previous years, streamlining the process.

For the first Band in the Sand, however, the agribusiness Class of 2013 didn’t have a process to follow. They showed up for class in September and their instructor informed them that they’d be planning and running a concert to raise funds for student clubs, and the concert would be in November. Then it was all hands on deck.

“It was a whirlwind,” Dana Gard, project lead for the first Band in the Sand, remembers. “Every day, we had something to do, from organizing with the rodeo committee to the DJ, the music, the food. It wasn’t just our class, it was the whole college. We had volunteers from the Emergency Training Centre, Residence, and Student Services. It was a full Lakeland operation. It was the first time we’d done it and we didn’t know which direction to take.”

As they worked together to figure out the best way to pull off the massive event, Gard began recording everything to help future years with the process.

“We didn’t have a starting point but I had gathered all sorts of information,” she explains. “I made it into a guide, a bible essentially. It was a record of who we were contacting, how we were doing things, what the timelines looked like, who was in charge of aspects like security. I didn’t want to leave the next groups with nothing.”

She was excited to hear that the guideline she left behind is still in use, 10 years later, and has grown with each consecutive year’s group adding to it.

“Knowing where to start was tricky,” Dolman says. “But we had the Band in the Sand bible from previous years, and it helped us get started.”

The event has changed in ten years, going from a family-friendly all-ages show in November to an 18+ one in the spring, with a few years spent as an online event because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Still, the foundation of the event remains the same – a sold-out show in the sand at the Equine Centre.

Behind the scenes, however, the event has always been much more complex.

“There is the event aspect of it,” says Gard. “But people might not realize how much work goes into this. There are aspects of accounting, book-keeping, marketing, public relations, managing people and logistics. It’s such a good resume builder. The biggest thing I learned from the experience was communication. Everyone’s expectations are different, and their perspectives are always different but they’re all worth listening to.”

It's a lesson that Dolman and her classmates learned this year as well.

“It was so important to work together as a team. Communication is essential for a professional group setting like this,” she explains. “Tensions can get high but we must remember that we’re all working together. I was nervous going into it because it’s such a big deal, but seeing out class come together was exciting. I was ecstatic when we got it all done and it went well. It was one of the most amazing experiences I’ve had.”

Photos: From top to bottom–1. Band in the Sand 2023. 2. The first Band in the Sand organizers in 2013. 3. The agribusiness class of 2023. 4. The very first Band in the Sand ticket from 2013.