The guitar program is among the many fine arts programs to have found success this year. At this year’s UIL competition, Guitar was able to achieve Professional Sweepstakes in sight reading as well as Outstanding Ensemble.

Guitar teacher Thomas Mann said it takes a lot of work to get to the point where students can earn recognition at University Interscholastic League competitions. They spent many hours working through di cult parts to shape the sounds so it sounds like a uni ed group instead of 25 different students playing their parts.

“Then it becomes one beautiful thing with all the dynamics and the phrasings and all the different type of articulation is that need to be done together,” Mann said.

Three of his best students who were part of the Sweepstakes win were surprised that they won; however, they were proud of their accomplishment.

“We worked really, really hard for it and we had to rehearse the parts a lot,” sophomore Alaina Nesby said. And we just wanted to prove that we could be the best.”

Junior Logan Austin said he is looking forward to achieving a lot of success in the guitar program in the future.

“We have a lot of potentials, like a lot of the students in the program really cared about it,” he said. “So I felt like we had a really good shot at doing good UIL.”

The students who won sweepstakes said they were glad they won from all the training they did every day but are hoping to do more of the same thing next year.