Every Ohio college band with a Macy’s story has a favorite year. Ohio University has three. Miami has two. Ohio State has exactly one — and for the most famous marching band in Ohio, one was all it ever got. On Thanksgiving morning, November 22, 2018, the Ohio State University Marching Band — the Best Damn Band in the Land — stepped off in New York City in the 92nd Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, in what Ohio State News described as the band’s first appearance in the parade. Eight Thanksgivings later, it remains its only one.
Getting there was no small thing. As Ohio State News reported when the selection was announced, the band would be representing the state of Ohio in its first parade appearance — one of just ten bands chosen from more than 100 applicants for the 2018 parade. For a band whose autumn Saturdays are spoken of in Columbus the way other cities talk about the weather, the invitation was a genuine first: in 92 parades, the Best Damn Band had never marched one.
The band that marched was 232 members strong, under director Christopher Hoch, and when its moment came in front of the television cameras at Herald Square, it reached for the most Broadway selection imaginable: “Lullaby of Broadway.” It was the perfect calling card — an Ohio band announcing itself on the Great White Way with the street’s own anthem, played the way only an all-brass-and-percussion band plays it.
It was a bitterly cold morning, cold enough that the Associated Press account of the day led with the weather and the relief that the balloons flew anyway. Ohio State’s band shared that parade with one other Ohio headliner. Springfield’s own John Legend rode the Build-A-Bear float and sang “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” from his album A Legendary Christmas — a performance listed on the official performer roster Macy’s released for the 2018 parade.
Legend also produced the parade’s most talked-about moment that year — afterward, when he explained that parade performers lip-sync because the floats cannot support live sound, a piece of honesty that the Associated Press coverage turned into the year’s defining parade story. The band, of course, had no such option: 232 musicians marching down Broadway in the cold play for real, or not at all.
The single trip looks stranger the longer Ohio’s full record sits beside it. Ohio University’s Marching 110 went three times — in 2000, in 2005, when it led the parade, and in 2017. Miami University’s band went twice, in 2003 and 2011, and both times drew the honor spot at the very end of the line of march, the last band in before Santa. Ohio’s high school bands have gone again and again: Pickerington four times, Defiance three, Centerville twice. Ohio State — the band other bands measure themselves against — went once.
Ohio State’s fingerprints were on the parade long before 2018, in a quieter way. Macy’s Great American Marching Band — the nationwide audition band that marches every year — was co-founded in 2006 by Dr. Jon Woods, then Ohio State’s band director, with Auburn’s Dr. Rick Good, and was created for the parade’s 80th anniversary. Ohio high schoolers have auditioned into it ever since: in 2013 alone, 13 Ohio students from Hilliard Bradley, Marysville, Brecksville-Broadview Heights, Perrysburg and Grove City marched in its ranks, WOSU reported at the time. The university’s band office had helped build one of the parade’s standing institutions a full dozen years before its own band finally got the call.
There has been no return trip since. The band list for the 100th parade, out ahead of Thanksgiving 2026, includes no Ohio band at all — and the next Ohio band down Broadway is already set, and it is a high school: William Mason High School of Mason, announced in October for the 101st parade in 2027, as the Cincinnati Enquirer reported. The Best Damn Band’s one morning in New York, meanwhile, stays what it has been since 2018: a single line in the band’s long history, and the whole of its Macy’s story.
This article is part of “Ohio at the Macy’s Parade,” NewsForce247’s daily series marking the parade’s 100th edition on Thanksgiving Day, November 26, 2026. The series runs through Thanksgiving Eve and closes on Wednesday, November 25, with “Akron Built the Balloons” — the story of the Akron craftsmen who built the parade’s giant balloons for more than five decades.
Photo: Joebengo, CC BY 3.0 — the Ohio State University Marching Band entering Ohio Stadium in Columbus.