A band director in August is running teenagers in uniform, on asphalt, in the sun, for hours — and has none of the support an athletic trainer has. To find out whether any state rule covers them, they would have to read twelve heat policies. Here is the answer in one table.
| State | Names marching band? |
|---|---|
| CA | No — athletics document |
| FL | No — athletics document |
| GA | No — athletics document |
| IA | Yes — in the rule itself |
| KY | No — athletics document |
| MA | No — athletics document |
| NC | No — athletics document |
| NY | No — athletics document |
| SC | No — athletics document |
| TN | No — athletics document |
| TX | Yes — in the rule itself |
| VA | No — athletics document |
Texas and Iowa. They did it in different ways and both are worth reading if you are anywhere else, because they are what a rule that covers band looks like.
The UIL's standard names marching band in its own headline sentence: Beginning with the 2026-2027 school year, the use of Wet Bulb Globe Temperature (WBGT) to monitor environmental conditions and guide activity modifications is no longer a recommendation, but a required standard for all UIL outdoor athletic and marching band activities. It is not a nod in an introduction. The section is titled for it — "2026-2027 REQUIRED Heat Protocols and Procedures for Outdoor UIL Athletic and Marching Band Activities" — the cooling-zone duty is written to include band contests and rehearsals, and even the definition of "practice" was changed to reach it.
The cooling-zone sentence: Rapid cooling zones must be available for each outdoor athletic and marching band contest, practice, workout, or conditioning session that is held in wet bulb globe temperatures of 79.7 in Class 2 or 82 in Class 3 degrees or higher.
And the definition, where "coach" becomes "coach/director": Practices are defined as the time period that a participant engages in a coach/director-supervised, school-approved sport or band conditioning-related activity.
Iowa's guidance is issued jointly by the two athletic bodies AND the state music and speech associations, which is why band appears at all. Appendix C gives Marching Band and Cheerleading rows of their own, alongside the football ones, with a footnote citing the NFHS article on keeping the marching band playing.
Read the temperatures carefully: they are the same bands as the athletics ladder. Iowa did not build a second scale for band — it wrote different required actions at the bands it already had, and says so: All sports/activities performed in a non-climate-controlled setting should follow the Wet Bulb Globe Thermometer Heat Modification Policy, however, below are some additional sport/activity guidance.
| WBGT band | What Iowa requires |
|---|---|
| BLACK 89.8 or greater (BLACK) | No outdoor activities, cancel or delay practices until lower WBGT is recorded. |
| RED 87.7 to 89.7 (RED) | out of uniform. Shorts, t-shirts and footwear only for activities. No conditioning allowed. |
| ORANGE 84.7 to 87.6 (ORANGE) | Partial / 1/2 uniform (no long sleeves or long pants). Move practice to grassy area rather than turf or concrete. |
Appendix C states nothing for band below its orange band. The main ladder still applies there — that is what the sentence above means — but no band-specific action is written, and we will not invent one.
NFHS — Heat Illness Prevention: Keep the Marching Band Playing
In the other ten states we have read, marching band appears nowhere in the heat policy. The scope words are "all sports", "student-athletes", "athletic activity". That is not a judgement about whether band rehearsal is dangerous — it plainly is, in the same heat, often in heavier uniforms and with less shade. It is a statement about what the document a director could point to actually says, which is nothing.
A silent document is not a clearance. It means no state threshold exists for that rehearsal, so whether one exists at all is a district decision — and a district that has not made it has not thereby decided the rehearsal is safe.
The heat sections are titled for sports — "Fundamentals of Heat Illness Prevention and Management for All Sports" — but the mandate sentence beside them is broader than the heading: it requires a heat illness policy for "all sanctioned activities". And cheerleading is under NCHSAA jurisdiction for exactly the category a heat policy sits in: Cheerleading is an activity that comes under the jurisdiction of the North Carolina High School Athletic Association in two areas – eligibility and health and safety guidelines Marching band is in neither. The word does not occur in the handbook's heat sections, and "marching" does not occur in the handbook at all.
Florida is the one state where something in the law does find a band director. The Zachary Martin Act's training duty is written past athletics: Each athletic coach and sponsor of extracurricular activities involving outdoor practices or events shall annually complete training in exertional heat illness identification, prevention, and response, including effective administration of cooling zones. So a Florida band director must complete heat illness training every year. The monitoring and modification duties in the paragraph above it are written for the "outdoor athletic contest, practice, workout, or conditioning session", and FHSAA's thresholds are for student-athletes. Trained, and with no number of your own.
If your state is on the "names marching band" side, you have a rule to cite and a number to plan against. If it is not, the useful move is not to argue about whether the athletics rule applies — it is to ask your district to adopt one, and the two states above are the model. Iowa's version is the cheapest to copy: the same thresholds the athletics teams already follow, with uniform and surface written into the actions.
In the meantime, the flags on this site are computed the same way whoever is on the field is computed for. The rule may not name you; the heat does not check.
Every document below was opened and read, page by page, including the pages whose tables are images. A word search that finds nothing in a scanned table finds nothing about the table.
wbgtcheck.com is an independent tool. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the UIL, GHSA, NFHS, NATA, or any state athletic association.
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