Correction: Edited a reference to the band’s recent Division I rating.

While the Dowagiac Union High School football team has captured the community’s attention following Friday’s come-from-behind victory over Buchanan to move on to the next round of the playoffs, another group of Chieftains has turned heads for their performances on the playing field this season.

The Dowagiac Marching Band is coming off its strongest season in the program’s history, following a string of highly successful performances at festivals over the last several weeks.

At the 2016 Michigan School Band and Orchestra Association competition Oct. 12 in Paw Paw, the band received a first division — the highest possible rating — from judges, for the first time in several years. Just a few weeks later, on Oct. 22, the school received some of its best scores ever at back-to-back competitions in Jenison and East Kentwood, said band director Justin Makarewicz.

“We are accomplishing a lot of never before [moments] recently,” Makarewicz said. “We have set the bar extremely high for next year.”

On top of those achievements, the students have also won awards for best marching twice this season, at Otsego Oct. 1 and at East Kentwood.

The show that the band has performed for judges the last several weeks is called “Luna,” an arrangement of several pieces of classical music, movie scores and original compositions based off the phases of the moon, Makarewicz said.

“It feels more mature than some of the pieces we have done in the past,” said Jonathan Stockwell, a drum major with the band. “It is a show that intrigues both judges and fans, and not just one or the other.”

This is the first year that Stockwell and fellow drum major Jessica Robison has helped lead the band, working alongside their classmates to improve both their musical and marching skills during the busy festival season.

For Makarewicz, who had led the band for two years, the turnaround the program has made since his arrival last year has been nothing short of incredible, especially given the smaller size of the group, he said.

“For a group of 47 to receive best marching, it means the judges were looking at the performances of everyone,” Makarewicz said. “So when I tell the students, ‘we won this award because the work all of you put in,’ I really mean it.”