Some dreams live on in time forever, says the summer Olympics anthem considered by many to be the greatest – and living proof of that is a retired accountant who recently enrolled as a freshman at Louisiana State University in his mid-60s to fulfill his lifelong ambition of playing for the school’s famed marching band.
Kent Broussard drew nationwide media attention after being shown on ESPN’s broadcast of the LSU football team’s victory at home against in-state rival Louisiana Tech on 6 September.
“At 66 years young, [he] went back to school to chase a dream that began in 1968 … of joining the Golden Band from Tigerland,” a voice on the broadcast said, referring to the formal name of LSU’s Grammy-nominated ensemble. “Kent picked up the tuba, he practiced, he trained – and yes, he enrolled at LSU, auditioned, he made the band.”
The broadcast then cut to Broussard wearing the band’s purple and gold uniform in stadium stands among his fellow tuba players as the voice continued: “Tonight, nearly six decades later, there he is … a 66-year-old freshman! Broussard – making his dream come true.”
Profiles from the Associated Press and the New York Times-owned sports website the Athletic followed in short order, adding to previous reporting from CBS as well as local media outlets about how Broussard’s story re-establishes that there’s really no such thing as “too late”.
As he tells it, his dream of joining LSU’s band ignited the first time he saw the group perform when he was a young child. And it helped that he was familiar with music – having played the sousaphone, an instrument belonging to the tuba family, in his high school band and at Southeastern Louisiana University, from which he graduated in 1980.
Broussard has said he went on to pursue an accounting career and start a family, leading him to believe for a time that he had missed his chance of ever playing for the band revered by fans of LSU’s four-time national champion Fighting Tigers football team. But as his 2023 retirement from accounting loomed, he contemplated what to do with his life next.
“I think back about how fast life has gone by … and thinking about something that I always wanted to do but just didn’t get a chance to do it,” Broussard told the AP of that process.
Those deliberations convinced him to try out for LSU’s marching band. He prepared himself physically by getting in the habit of running with a weighted vest as well as marching through his neighborhood while toting a 30-pound sousaphone. He reacquainted himself musically with the instrument, successfully applied as a student to LSU – and, upon auditioning, earned a coveted spot in the Golden Band from Tigerland.
That set the stage for his debut on the field of Tiger Stadium on Saturday during the first game at home for the LSU football team’s 2025 season. With his silver-streaked hair gleaming under the stadium’s lights, the bespectacled Broussard joined in as the band of his dreams belted out numbers from The Wizard of Oz, The Wiz and Wicked. He aided the group as it fell in and out of formation spelling out words or creating images that could be made out by spectators.
Tiger Stadium’s jumbo screen displayed a closeup of Broussard at one point, eliciting a roar from the crowd packing the 102,000-seat bowl in his home town: Louisiana’s capital, Baton Rouge.
In remarks that he later gave to the AP, Broussard sought to downplay the significance of his involvement with LSU’s band. He called himself “just a 66-year-old guy who wants to play music”.
“I’m doing this because I want to be part of something great – because that’s what they are,” Broussard said of his bandmates.
Yet he also suggested that he grasped the public’s fascination with the larger truth he embodied.
“People retire,” Broussard said to the AP. “Dreams don’t.”
The Associated Press contributed reporting
