In July 2021, Xavier Summers, a sousaphone player in the ensemble formerly known as the Washington Redskins Marching Band, bought a house in Prince George’s County, in no small part because it is an eight-minute drive from FedEx Field. The NFL’s oldest band had been sidelined during the coronavirus pandemic, but indications were that it would return. After driving 218 miles round trip from his previous home in Delaware to Landover for weekly rehearsals and home games for nine years, Summers looked forward to the easier commute.

“The one thing you don’t want to give up is that thing you’re passionate about,” Summers, a consultant whose father, Eric, was the band director until this year and whose brother also was in the band, said of his long-distance commitment to the group. “Then they didn’t bring it back.”

To be clear, there will be a marching band at Washington Commanders home games this season, but even beyond the new uniforms and revised fight song, which the 60-person ensemble of part-time paid employees debuted at the team’s first preseason game this month, the group will bear little resemblance to the all-volunteer band that was twice as large and provided the soundtrack for Washington’s NFL team for more than 80 years.

Twenty members of the former band, all of whom were required to re-audition, were selected for the new band. Summers and many of his former bandmates declined the opportunity for myriad reasons, including what they considered the team’s disregard for the former band’s leadership. While the Commanders celebrate the return of one of the franchise’s most recognizable traditions and new members prepare to build on that legacy, some musicians from the former band feel discarded and lament what has been lost.

“This isn’t the band coming back,” Lynn Haase, who joined the former band as a tenor saxophone player in 2016, said recently. “This is a band coming back.”

After relocating his team from Boston to D.C. in 1937, franchise founder and showman George Preston Marshall invited local musical groups, including the Chestnut Farms Chevy Chase Dairy Band, to perform at games at Griffith Stadium. By the following season, Marshall’s team had its own band and a fight song, which was composed by Barnee Breeskin and featured lyrics by Marshall’s wife, silent film star Corinne Griffith.

The band was a family affair — in the figurative and literal sense — from the start. It remained that way for generations.

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Wendy Harrell, who played the mellophone in the former band, met her husband, a trombone player, shortly after she successfully auditioned for the group in 2001. They were married in 2007 and have two musically inclined sons they figured would join them in the stands with instruments one day.

“Up until covid hit, we thought we would be in the band for a long time,” said Harrell, a lifelong fan of the team.

Few members of the former band are more revered than 93-year-old Don Bartlett, who joined in 1969 and whose oldest son marched next to him during his final two years of high school. Even after a heart attack seven years ago left Bartlett unable to carry his brass tuba, he continued to serve as line chief, attending every rehearsal and game.

“The band is a family,” said Chris Howell, a saxophone player who joined in 2009 after seeing the group perform in the Greater Manassas Christmas Parade. “It was an opportunity to belong to something more than yourself. From sitting in the locker rooms before the game and standing around at rehearsal, you really get to know an awful lot of people really well.”

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The band, which totaled roughly 120 members before the pandemic, was a mix of enthusiastic amateurs who worked IT and government jobs by day and people who made a living playing and teaching music in the D.C. area. The volunteer ensemble was a regular presence, spanning three stadiums and the team’s ups and downs. With the introduction of an in-stadium DJ and an increased reliance on recorded music during games in recent years, the band’s playing time diminished, but its loyal members cherished the camaraderie and the chance to represent the burgundy and gold.

“Even when the team wasn’t doing well,” said David LaMay, who played clarinet and saxophone, “the band was.”

“Between us, it was the biggest party this side of New Orleans,” said 60-year-old Jonathan Cooper, a saxophone player who joined the band shortly before the team left RFK Stadium after the 1996 season. “We loved playing with each other, and whatever the team asked us to do, we’d do.”

In March 2020, the band went on hiatus along with the rest of the sports world. The NFL’s covid protocols limited the number of personnel allowed on the field the following season, but Joey Colby-Begovich, who was hired as the team’s vice president of guest experience that March, worked with drum line leader Myles Overton and longtime band liaison Tony Cardenas to organize an 18-member drum line to perform at home games. Team president Jason Wright said the marching band would return as part of the team’s rebrand in 2022.

Team leadership decided members of the new band would be paid; the franchise’s cheerleading squad, which was replaced by a coed dance team in 2021, had been for years. After consulting with military and college bands about how it could create a robust sound with a smaller, professional ensemble, the Commanders settled on a 60-person band.

The team communicated these changes to Cardenas, who shared them with members of the former band. Haase created a private Facebook group for band alumni to keep in touch and organize a reunion. She also contacted Colby-Begovich and, at his request, admitted him to the Facebook group to field questions from her fellow band members about what the changes would mean for them.

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Colby-Begovich shared information about compensation ($20 an hour for rehearsals and $25 an hour for performance days) and employee benefits, including access to a human resources representative, and said the band would receive similar attention as the dance team going forward. He mentioned the team would hire a music director and explained that anyone interested in being part of the new band would be required to audition virtually. Those selected would be required to re-audition every year. (The former band held auditions for a select number of spots that opened up after each season, but existing members were not required to re-audition.)

“I have no ill will toward them,” Bartlett said of the changes, “but I was sad and disappointed that all of a sudden our traditional band was just cut off.”

Several band members expressed frustration that Overton — who had more than 35 years of experience as a drummer in the U.S. Marine Drum and Bugle Corps and the U.S. Army Band — and his similarly qualified fellow band leaders, including Eric Summers, Cardenas and longtime drum major John Carpenter, were not given any special consideration for their decades of dedication and institutional knowledge, though all were invited to apply for the music director position.

“We were stunned,” Haase said of the lack of continuity in leadership.

“Once we found out our leaders were not being asked to return and they were hiring people who were never in the band and didn’t understand our history, we were upset,” Harrell said.

Eric Summers joined the band as a sousaphone player in 1982 and became the ensemble’s second Black director after George White died in 1998. He said he didn’t learn that he wasn’t part of the team’s plans for the new band until the music director position was posted in March. The listing indicated the music director was responsible for selecting the band director, the role Summers had held for more than two decades.

“It would appear that if I would have been there 23 years as a leader, if I would have to reapply for something that I had been doing very effectively for all those years, I would have gotten notice,” said Summers, who grew up a few blocks from RFK and used to watch Washington’s band practice behind D.C. General Hospital. “That’s why it feels like such a slap in the face.”

Xavier Summers wrote a letter to Colby-Begovich advocating on behalf of his father. He said Colby-Begovich later apologized for the miscommunication, but by that point the team had already hired Jeffrey Sean Dokken, the maestro and conductor of the Symphony Orchestra of Northern Virginia, as music director.

Eric Summers, who retired in June after a more than 40-year career as a band director and assistant principal in D.C. and Prince George’s County public schools, opted not to apply for the Commanders’ band director position because it was more akin to the drum major’s role in the former band.

“It is important for all band members to know — past and present — that they are a part of our team’s history and legacy, and we honor and respect that legacy,” Colby-Begovich said through a team spokesman.

More than 100 musicians auditioned for the Commanders’ band, including husband-and-wife mellophone players Corey and Elle Emerson. The couple had been members of the former band since they moved to the D.C. area in 2018, and both made the cut for the new ensemble. After the uncertainty of the pandemic, Corey Emerson said he was excited to learn that the band was returning, albeit with a different look.

“We’re still getting to know each other, whereas when we joined the band before, there were people who had been in there for decades,” Emerson said. “That part, I think, will come in time. Everyone is very positive, and we’ve come together as a group pretty quickly. I’m excited about where we go from here.”

“I hope they have as great an experience as we did,” said Harrell, who hasn’t ruled out auditioning in the future. “I also know it takes time to form those bonds and become the type of group that we had been for so long.”

Saxophone player Kevin Epps, who graduated from Bridgewater College in May, is one of the new faces in the band, which is one of two in the NFL along with Baltimore’s Marching Ravens. He described the experience as “phenomenal.”

“The section leader for the saxophone section is a member of the old band, and he’s been really accepting of us and more than willing to help us out,” Epps said.

Xavier Summers said his father wouldn’t have discouraged him from auditioning for the new band, but he ultimately decided against it. He also declined an invitation to the “Hail and Farewell” banquet the team hosted at FedEx Field on June 25, an event that was organized after a former band member contacted Commanders co-CEO Tanya Snyder. Following a catered reception on the club level, more than 50 former band members gathered on the concourse to perform a variety of familiar tunes, including the team’s original fight song.

“Every song we played, we looked at each other and realized that this was the end,” Haase said. “We’re not going to be together anymore.”

In the weeks since the event, former band members have kicked around the idea of establishing an alumni band that could perform at events in the area. Several former band members have planned a postgame jam session in a parking lot near FedEx Field after the Commanders’ season opener Sept. 11.

“I’m pretty sure we’ll have the majority of the band there because that’s the kind of family and the culture that was cultivated,” Xavier Summers said.

Bartlett, who didn’t audition for the new band, has satisfied his musical fix over the past three years by playing in the Kena Shriner’s Band in Manassas, using an old fiberglass sousaphone that’s significantly lighter than the brass instrument he carried around on Sundays in his younger days.

“I don’t think they’d be interested in having an old line chief who can’t march,” Bartlett said of a possible return as a member of the Commanders’ band. “But I’d be first in line if we could ever get the old band back together.”

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