Opinion: Independent youth pipe bands are built to lose
By Kris Bawden
The message has been consistent across piping and drumming organizations, educators and competition circles: “The future depends on youth development.”
Invest in young players. Do that, and the rest will take care of itself, right?
Great idea. It’s a message everyone agrees with; to be sure, it gets nodded along to in AGMs all the time.
But for independent pipe bands, building youth programs often comes with a quiet and inconvenient truth: You’re not building the band’s future. You’re building everyone else’s.
Any independent band that invests seriously in young players will run into the same wall.
Two inevitable losses:
- Life cycle attrition. Post-secondary education, Careers, Relationships, Geography.
Pipers and drummers in their twenties don’t just drift; they disappear in chunks as they live “real life.” When consistency is key to the craft, losing even a few trained players isn’t just a dip; it’s a structural hit.
- Talent extraction
Train a kid well enough, long enough, and they become visible. People learn their name if they keep hearing it or seeing it on the prize list. Once they’re visible, they’re as good as gone.
It’s not malicious. Not even dramatic.
Higher-grade bands offer a stronger competitive environment, like wild horses racing and competing with each other. Deeper rosters, bigger sound, and more challenging and “fun” tunes they may have grown up listening to.
In pipe bands, there’s very little to stop that movement. In any other ecosystem, it would be called scouting or poaching, but here it’s just another Tuesday.
Where it really becomes an unwinnable war? Talent doesn’t develop evenly.
“You can’t build a youth band in a straight line. You’ll get a handful of standouts, a middle group holding it together and a base that’s still learning. The top-tier, the standouts, are the ones who get picked off. Which means the better you do your job as an instructor or as an instruction-based organization, the more efficiently you create your own talent drain.”
You can’t build a youth band in a straight line. You’ll get a handful of standouts, a middle group holding it together and a base that’s still learning. The top-tier, the standouts, are the ones who get picked off. Which means the better you do your job as an instructor or as an instruction-based organization, the more efficiently you create your own talent drain.
You can’t grade up on the back of one or two exceptional players, but you can lose those two players fast when they’ve significantly outgrown your band and grade level. That’s the brutal trap.
The exceptions? Plenty exist, but they are not random.
Bands tied to larger organizations (police, legacy institutions, multi-grade systems) avoid this pitfall because they have internal ladders. Players can move up without leaving. These organizations don’t lose players to the system because they are the system.
This is purely an independent pipe band’s dilemma.
“Why invest years building talented players if your reward is watching them leave right as they’re about to peak?”
Why invest years building talented players if your reward is watching them leave right as they’re about to peak?
That’s the knife.
Independent bands with youth teaching programs don’t fail because they’re poorly run. They fail because they succeed. The wider ecosystem benefits and the originating band pays the price.
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There is no guaranteed ROI on youth, but some bands, unrealistically, do expect something back – just not always explicitly.
“We’ll move up grades together” – fantasy camp (with a very short list of exceptions)
Inveraray & District did it. They executed that dream scenario with a heavy investment in youth, and they moved up the grades together. It was perfect alignment. Good luck replicating that.
“We’re building the next generation for our band” – you’re setting yourself up for disappointment
“We trained you here” – emotional loyalty only goes so far before it becomes manipulative
Any leader who plays these mental games with themselves or others is practicing a type of conditional altruism, and that’s when anger and resentment set in for some.
“The moment you expect something back, it stops being altruism and starts being a gamble . . . and for an independent, lower-grade, youth-focused band? That’s not a bet I’m going to make.”
The moment you expect something back, it stops being altruism and starts being a gamble . . . and for an independent, lower-grade, youth-focused band? That’s not a bet I’m going to make.
So why bother at all? The scene won’t change.
Most pipers and drummers, especially the good ones, didn’t just appear. Someone gave them time and attention, tolerated blown attacks or poor maintenance. They did it without any guarantee of return or band stability.
I will never forget my teacher and mentor sitting at my grandmother’s kitchen table helping me with some big MSR music for my new band. Never mind that his band was on its last legs. Then later in life, for a brief minute, I had a player under my wing who also moved on to bigger things, and all I remember was being disappointed for about five seconds, then excited. Excited to see how far he could take things. Three years later, he was Champion Supreme in Grade 2 light music and I, as emcee, got to hand him his trophy and pin.
You don’t teach youth so your band can win. You do it because someone once did it for you.
What do you think? We invite your thoughts via our Comments tool below.
Kris Bawden is the pipe-major and founder of the Grade 4 MacEoin-Ramsay Pipe Band of Ottawa, and a media personality (Big Kris, “BK”) and producer whose career has spanned multiple cities in Ontario, including Hamilton, Barrie, and Ottawa, and is probably best known for his FM Morning show on K-Rock 105.7 in Kingston. Music credits include The Trews’ “Highway of Heroes” as studio session piper, and he appeared in the music video. He was presented with a gold record by The Trews in 2014. Outside of his media persona, from 2008 to 2011, he served Canada as a civilian with the “Influence Activity Task Force” in Kandahar, providing terrestrial FM radio programming capability and management to Psy-Op assets for ISAF. He lives in Ottawa.
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Great article – and true! An addition – we train the youth because we’re part of something bigger than the band. Similar to the article – if another band is the recipient of the learner, the pipes or drums are flourishing. Further to that – as a public school music teacher – I don’t necessarily want my kids going down a path of music – I want the benefits of music (hand/eye coordination, memorization, team work, etc) to impact their own lives in ways they may be unaware of. Really though, I teach because I like to see the look on their face and the pride they have when they finally master something. That’s the jackpot.
Embrace the feature, it’s not a bug!
Nothing wrong with being the band that stays at a given level but acts as a nursery.
I enjoyed reading this – thanks Kris 🙂
For me, one of the greatest rewards of teaching is seeing a young person go on to achieve, even if those achievements happen somewhere else.
Not everyone is going to reach the same level, and I think we sometimes need to remind ourselves that as educators, our job is about much more than developing players for our own band or organisation. It’s about developing musicians, and importantly, developing people.
Even at school level, we have young players who can’t play with the school band because they’re busy playing in Grade 1. There is a little disappointment in losing players who could help you win prizes, but that’s quickly outweighed by the pride and satisfaction of seeing them flourish.
I think the real success is maintaining positive relationships. If you can create an environment where young people feel valued and supported, hopefully they’ll want to come back, share their experiences, inspire the next generation and perhaps even give something back to the organisation that helped them on their way.
Young people leaving an organisation to go on and better themselves is perhaps not a failure of our scene but one of its greatest strengths.