If one Ohio town owns a piece of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, it is Pickerington. By the band’s own history, the Pickerington marching Tigers have made the trip to New York four times — 1990, 1995, 2001 and 2009 — more than any other Ohio high school band, and in 2001 they were picked for the honor every band director dreams about: leading the entire parade. 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.
Four trips across three decades is a record no other Ohio school in the parade’s history can match. Ohio University has been three times; Defiance’s band, profiled elsewhere in this series, went three times; Centerville waited 39 years between its two appearances. Pickerington’s four invitations — under the school’s own count of its history — span the era when the band grew from Pickerington High School into Pickerington High School Central, and the Tigers kept getting the call.
The summit came in 2001, when, by the band’s account, the Tigers were selected to lead the parade — first in the line of march, ahead of every balloon, float and band in America that morning, two months after the September 11 attacks had given that Thanksgiving an added weight in New York. Leading the Macy’s parade is the single most prestigious slot a marching band can hold; the band at the front sets out first from 77th Street and carries the parade’s opening image to the television audience.
The best-documented of the four trips is the last one. Marching.com’s account of the 2009 parade records a 250-member Pickerington band under director Michael Sewell performing “Jingle Bells” and “Sing, Sing, Sing” at Herald Square, and the selection drew official notice back home: the Ohio Senate passed a resolution honoring the band’s 2009 invitation. The photograph with this story is the Tigers on the route in 1995 — a sea of uniforms filling a Manhattan avenue, with a balloon floating behind them.
The Sewell name carries a second Pickerington chapter in the parade. After Michael Sewell’s death, the Pickerington-based Michael D. Sewell Memorial Foundation created the Band Directors Marching Band — hundreds of band directors from across the country marching as one — which performed in the 2023 parade under Bowling Green State University director Jon Waters, a story still to come in this series. Pickerington’s parade legacy, in other words, did not end with its own students; its late director’s name carried a whole band of directors down the route.
What does it take for a suburban Ohio band to be invited four times? Macy’s selects roughly ten bands a year from a national pool of applicants, and repeat invitations follow programs that deliver — musically, visually and logistically — at a scale a two-and-a-half-mile television production demands. Pickerington’s program did it across three decades, under changing school names and generations of students, which is why the Tigers stand at the top of Ohio’s parade table.
No Ohio band marches in the 100th parade this Thanksgiving, and the next Ohio invitation has already gone to Mason, which will march in the 101st parade in 2027 — a story coming later in this series. When Mason’s band steps off, it will be chasing a standard Pickerington set: not just to reach New York, but to be asked back, again and again.
The four trips also trace the growth of Pickerington itself. The first invitations came when Pickerington was still a fast-growing village anchored by a single high school; by 2009 the district had two high schools and the parade band marched under the Pickerington Central name, 250 strong. Through the name changes and the suburb’s transformation, the constant was the program’s standard — the thing Macy’s kept inviting back, across eighteen years and four Thanksgivings.
“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.
Photo: The Pickerington Marching Tigers on the route of the 1995 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Photo: Reybroeke614, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.