On the beat Percussionists plenty proud to pound out rhythm at Blue Bomber games By: David Sanderson Posted: 11:40 AM CDT Friday, Oct. 24, 2025

There are few things Andrew Smith enjoys more in life than drumming and football.

The 35-year-old Winnipeg school teacher took up the drums at age 12, around the same time he began pulling for his hometown Blue Bombers.

Imagine Smith’s reaction, then, 11 years ago when he showed up for his weekly advanced drum lesson and was told by his instructor that the Bombers were hoping to introduce a drumline — a battery of percussionists most often associated with high school and university marching bands — to the game-day experience.

It got better. His teacher, who had been tasked with helping to form the ensemble, wanted to know if Smith was interested in signing on.

“I think my answer was somewhere between absolutely and positively,” Smith says with a chuckle.

Eleven years later, Smith remains convinced that not only does he have the best gig on the planet, he and his bandmates also have the best seats in the house.

“We get to be down on the sidelines with the coaches and players, with a perfect view of the action,” says Smith, who, along with the other 11 members of the club’s official drumline, will be keeping the beat again this Saturday when the Bombers host the Montreal Alouettes in their final regular-season game.

“Throw in the fact that we get to bang away in front of 32,000 football fans for three hours. I mean, seriously, what’s not to like?”

Like Smith, Jaremy Ediger, 36, has been drumming for the majority of his life, getting his start as a Grade 7 student at Churchill High School. And also like Smith, Ediger was already bleeding blue and gold when a friend of his who worked for the Bombers — a fellow musician he’d been playing with off-and-on — openly wondered if being part of a football drumline would be up his alley or not.

“The way it was told to me, when Wade (Miller, Bombers’ president and CEO) became CEO (in 2013), his MO became, how do we bring the American college-football atmosphere to the CFL?” says Ediger, a warehouse worker for Vinyl Storage Solutions, which makes accessories for vinyl-record collectors.

“We already had the cheerleaders and the mascots, but Wade wanted to add a drumline and tailgating and all that other great stuff, which he proceeded to do.”

Smith and Ediger, the two remaining members from the drumline’s original unit, look at each other and smile as they recall the troupe’s rather humble beginnings.

“For a drumline, it’s not like you can play a normal snare (drum). You need actual marching drums — ones that can be heard up in the nosebleeds,” explains Smith, a fan of the 2002 movie Drumline, which starred Nick Cannon as a new student who butts heads with his bandleader at a fictitious U.S. university.

The problem was, the specialty drums the team was purchasing for what was then an eight-member line were slow to arrive. That forced them to start the season by pounding away on regulation-size Blue Bombers helmets that had been MacGyvered onto metal drum stands.

Don’t forget the Gatorade coolers, Ediger pipes in, mentioning they mostly stuck to the lower-level concourse during the 2014 season, drumming up support ahead of the opening kickoff and again at halftime.

“We were more of a mobile drumline back then, picking up our coolers and helmets and moving from Gate 1 to Gate 2 to Gate 3… wherever the team wanted us,” Ediger says.

This is the fourth year Daniel De Ryck has handled bass-drum duties for the Bombers drumline, presently a mix of nine males and three females ranging in age from 16 to late 30s. The 21-year-old, who calls having a 25-pound bass drum strapped to his shoulders for a few hours a “great workout,” vividly remembers his first game, not so much for the tunes he learned ahead of time as for the action taking place directly in front of him.

“I’d been to a lot of Bomber games but suddenly, there I was down on the field, hearing the players’ pads crashing together,” says De Ryck, who began playing drums at age 10 in an effort to emulate a musical uncle.

“What sticks out the most about that one was when (Bombers defensive back) Winston Rose caught an interception and flew right past us. I turned to the guy next to me and said something like, ‘this is so cool, I can’t believe I’m here.’”

A typical game-day for the Bombers drumline goes something like this.

If kickoff is scheduled for 2 p.m., as it is for this weekend’s tilt, members congregate in their stadium dressing room by noon. Following a quick pre-game meal, they make their way to a nearby storage area that houses their instruments, a mix of snare drums, tenor drums, cymbals and De Ryck’s bass drum.

Gear at the ready, they return to the dressing room for what Wyatt King, the drumline’s 26-year-old musical director, refers to as a “floorm-up.”

“Basically, it’s a warm-up but since we’d make way too much noise playing our actual drums, we hit our sticks on the floor, which has a really nice bounce to it,” says King, who first auditioned for the drumline when he was in Grade 11, and made the grade two years later in 2018 when he was a university student.

If it’s a weekend game, which allows everybody more time as none of them are rushing to the stadium from their job or school, they’ll next head to the tailgate plaza. There they trot out assorted cadences and grooves, while soliciting requests from the growing throng.

Name it and they can probably play it, Ediger says, listing Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off and the Vengaboys’ We Like to Party as recent additions to their always-growing repertoire.

“In the Air Tonight (by Phil Collins) is always popular and because people kept yelling it out as a joke, we finally taught ourselves to play Freebird, by Lynyrd Skynyrd,” Smith adds, singling out King as the person responsible for displaying hand signals, to let everybody know what’s next on the setlist.

Twenty minutes before the game gets underway, the drumline moves over to the same end zone tunnel the Blue Bombers emerge from during player introductions. They gallop onto the field alongside the team before situating themselves in their designated spot on the visitors’ side, near the 25-yard line.

“Then it depends on who gets the ball first,” King says.

“If it’s the opposing team, we start making noise right away and if it’s the Bombers, we rest our shoulders and gear up.”

Smith says the CFL has strict rules in place that dictate when they are allowed to create a ruckus. Drumlines — there are a few more in the league, including ones in Calgary and Toronto — can be active between plays provided they park their sticks when a team approaches the line of scrimmage, so as not to disrupt the quarterback from calling out signals. Drumming during injury timeouts is another no-no.

“We’ve been told the team can get fined or penalized if we play when we’re not supposed to, so we have to pay close attention to what’s happening out there,” King says.

As for interactions, sure, the crowd shows its appreciation by clapping or dancing along, but so do the combatants.

“There have definitely been times when we’ve looked over and players and coaches from the visiting team are moving their feet to some of our funkier numbers,” Smith boasts.

Also, on occasion, a Blue Bombers representative will make a point of popping by, to say they’re sounding great, Ediger says. King reports that they each receive an honorarium for their efforts, which includes regular practice sessions throughout the season plus appearances at events such as the Santa Claus Parade and, this November, Grey Cup week. (When it comes to weather, the drummers we spoke to all prefer fall football. Give them 15 C and little to no wind and they’re in heaven, they agree.)

Smith, Ediger, De Ryck and King all shake their head when asked if they ever get butterflies, given how many people are in the stands, game in and game out.

“It’s more like we feed off the energy of the fans. Plus it’s not like anybody is buying a ticket to a game to see us,” Ediger says with a wink.

“Not so fast,” Smith says, playfully elbowing his cohort in the ribs.

“My grandmother is a huge Bombers fan and she tells me she watches the games specifically to hear the drums.”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca