Ohio’s next Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade story is already written — it just hasn’t marched yet. While no Ohio band will appear in this month’s 100th parade, the William Mason High School Marching Band of Mason, Ohio, already holds the state’s next invitation: the band will march in the 101st parade on Thanksgiving Day 2027, the first Macy’s invitation in the school’s history. This is part of “Ohio at the Macy’s Parade,” NewsForce247’s series telling the parade’s first century through the Ohioans woven into it, counting down to the 100th parade on Thanksgiving morning.
The invitation arrived as a surprise. As the Cincinnati Enquirer reported, Macy’s revealed Mason’s selection in a surprise ceremony at the school on October 16, 2026 — the kind of announcement Macy’s stages at chosen schools each year, complete with a $10,000 donation from the company to help the program toward its trip. Marching.com’s published band list for the 2027 parade confirms Mason’s place in the 101st parade’s lineup, a full year before the band steps off.
The numbers behind the invitation are formidable. The Enquirer reported a 232-member band under director Jason Sleppy — one of the largest school bands in Ohio, from one of the state’s largest high schools, in the fast-growing Warren County city of Mason. Size alone doesn’t earn a Macy’s invitation; the parade selects about ten bands a year nationally, weighing musicianship, showmanship and the ability to project to a television audience across a two-and-a-half-mile route. But a 232-member band that earns the call brings its own kind of spectacle with it.
Mason’s selection extends a Cincinnati-area thread that runs quietly through the parade’s Ohio history. Lakota West, from neighboring West Chester, was the only Ohio band in the 2013 parade — a selection the Ohio House of Representatives marked with a resolution. Indian Hill and Turpin, both Cincinnati-area schools, appear in the parade’s band listings from earlier decades. And the parade’s corporate parent was itself run from Cincinnati for a generation: Macy’s became a division of Cincinnati-based Federated Department Stores in 1994, and the holding company took the Macy’s, Inc. name in 2007. The invitation to Mason, in that light, is also a homecoming of sorts.
For the series, Mason’s story is the hinge between the parade’s Ohio past and its future. Every other story in this run looks backward — to bands that marched in 1976 or 1995 or 2018, to balloons built in Akron across the middle of the last century. Mason looks forward: a year of fundraising, rehearsal and anticipation in Warren County, ending at 77th Street and Central Park West on the morning of November 25, 2027.
That year will matter to the students who march it. A Macy’s invitation lands on a band program like a banner year lands on a sports team — it becomes the story one class of students tells for the rest of its life, and the standard the next classes measure themselves against. Pickerington turned its first invitations into four. Centerville waited 39 years for a second. Mason’s first is now on the calendar.
Between now and then, the 100th parade marches without an Ohio band — the announced 2026 lineup draws from Indiana, Tennessee, South Carolina, Hawaii, Texas, Connecticut, Alabama, Illinois and New York, plus the nationwide Great American Marching Band, which individual Ohio students audition into each year. Ohio’s colors will be carried this Thanksgiving by the century behind the parade, and next Thanksgiving, at last, by Mason.
The long runway is part of the honor’s design. A parade that announces its bands more than a year out — Mason learned its fate in October 2026 for a parade in November 2027 — gives a school time to raise the considerable cost of the trip, build a show worthy of the route, and let the anticipation do its work in the community. By the time the Comets march, Mason will have had thirteen months of knowing. Very few high school bands anywhere get a year like the one now in front of them.
“Ohio at the Macy’s Parade” continues through Thanksgiving Eve, when it concludes with “Akron Built the Balloons” — the Nov. 25 finale telling how Akron’s Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. designed and built the parade’s giant balloons from 1927 into the early 1980s, including every Superman balloon the parade ever flew. The 100th Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade steps off Thursday, November 26, at 8:30 a.m. Eastern on NBC and Peacock.