LAWRENCE, Kan. — Dozens of Lawrence High School band members were sickened with norovirus during a recent team trip to Disney World.
The band traveled hundreds of miles to compete against schools from across the country for the special trip taken every three years by the high school.
Noah Stussie, a sophomore tuba player, said the band was filled with excitement at the start of the journey.
“It’s mainly an opportunity to showcase how well we’re doing and we get to see how good we are,” he explained. “It’s really nice for everyone to get together. We all get to hang out.”
However, after arriving in Florida, Stussie said many students became sick.
“It was mainly just vomiting, diarrhea, stomach aches, headaches,” he explained. “We just figured out that this was too many people sick to just have a weird coincidence.”
All three of Stussie’s hotel roommates caught the illness and the sudden rush of sick band members put the team in a bind.
“Everyone’s morale took a huge drop,” the sophomore explained. “A lot of the people who got sick were soloists who had big parts in some of the songs we were doing.”
With a third of the band sick with norovirus, parents on the trip stepped in to help.
G.R. Gordon-Ross, a father and chaperone who works as a pharmacist, led the effort to look after the sickened band members.
“The kids that were sick, we just kept them isolated to their rooms and it was all about keeping them hydrated,” he explained. “It just hit different kids differently.”
Gordon-Ross kept in close contact with other parents and said the monitoring and recovery efforts required teamwork.
“It was a group effort. It really was,” he explained. “The adults had a group chat that was constantly communicating and asking, ‘How is this student doing? What should we do?’”
Despite dozens of band members being sickened with norovirus, the team still competed in the Disney World competition.
“We just tried to keep our spirits as high as we could,” Stussie said.
On the day of the performance, the band rose to the occasion.
The wind ensemble team placed first in the contest, beating out around thirty other high schools.
Lawrence High School’s jazz team finished second, while the symphonic band placed third.
Facing tough odds during the trip, Stussie said the results showed the strength of the team.
“I think it says that we were ready for it. We prepared enough to the point that we were pretty much ready for anything,” he explained. “We didn’t expect something like that to happen but even though it did happen, we were still able to power through it.”
The high school band’s trip to Disney World lasted six days.
After the band arrived back in Kansas on Sunday, some team members were still fighting the illness.
