“Game days are pretty crazy around here,” says Carol Nelson as she leads me into her office.

She’s right; the band hall is packed with kids practicing their music and loudly talking with one another.

This game day, Friday, Sept. 9, is a special one for the McCallum band director of 37 years. McCallum is playing its first road game of the season against Seguin High School, where Nelson was once a student and a member of the marching band.

Nelson was a first-chair trumpet player in the Seguin Matador Band, which consisted of about 200 people. Although marching band was a huge part of her high school experience, she was also involved in many other extracurricular activities.

“I was president of the band, president of the National Honor Society, president of the Spanish Club, vice president of Future Teachers of America, on the track team [and] in the church choir,” Nelson said. “I was also an All-State Trumpet player. … I [also] took academics very seriously and was salutatorian of my class.”

Nelson’s list of accomplishments are more than impressive. At the time, they were ground-breaking.

“When I was a sophomore, the band director asked me if I wanted to be in jazz band,” Nelson said. “I said, ‘Sure,’ and he said, ‘Oh good, [but] we’ll have to let the boys in the band vote to see if you can be in the band.’ They voted yes, so I got to be in it.”

Nelson’s success did not stop in high school; she continued to achieve heavily in college at UT.

“I was in the Longhorn band, I think the first female trumpet section leader, and I got a bachelor’s in music education,” Nelson said. “I also was in a concert group called the Wind Ensemble; it was the top wind players, I got to do that as a freshman. I got my master’s in applie

d conducting. I was also the graduate assistant for the Longhorn band, so I got to chart a show and teach it to them. I was also president of Tau Beta Sigma, a girls’ sorority for band, so we did a lot of community service for the band. After I got my master’s, my first job was at McCallum.”

Nelson has become a staple of McCallum’s fine arts program since 1980, earlier than when one of her assistant directors was even born. One of her former students has even gone on to teach at another high school in AISD.

“Ms. Nelson is one of the most experienced teachers at McCallum, and I think it shows,” junior and percussion section leader Keane Sammon said. “She knows when to push her students to be better, but as a person can be very relatable and very easy to have a conversation with.”

Sammon also mentioned that Nelson isn’t just relatable: she genuinely cares for and connects with her students beyond the band room: “At the end of the last school year, one of our tuba players had a tumor found in his brain, and had to be taken into surgery to have it removed,” Sammons said. “On his final day of being in the hospital after his surgery, Ms. Nelson [worked] with [him] on playing the tuba, to help him gain back some of his skills.

Sammon isn’t the only one who mentioned Nelson’s empathy; assistant band director Matt Ehlers, who has worked with Nelson for over 10 years, echoed the sentiment.

“Ms. Nelson shows an incredible amount of empathy in her teaching,” Ehlers said. “She truly cares about each student’s feelings and makes an effort to ensure everyone’s experience in her program is a positive one. Teaching is not just a job to her; it is a realization of who she really is.”

Many of her students, after hearing her stories of her high school band experience, were eager to honor her experience as they played at halftime.

“Playing at Seguin was super fun, but it was a little stressful, because we all wanted to perform well for the school Ms. Nelson graduated from,” sophomore and trumpet player Chance Green said.

Though she remembers her high school times fondly, Nelson very enthusiastically said she supports the Knights in victory and that she loves McCallum’s high school experience.

“It’s a different climate altogether,” Nelson said. “At Seguin you just went to your classes and did your things.[McCallum has] so many more opportunities for people to be involved, like we didn’t have an orchestra at Seguin. There is a wealth of opportunities to perform and engage in creativity here that there weren’t when I was at Seguin.”