High school football season is about to begin, and it's not just players and coaches getting ready for the Friday night lights.

High school marching bands have been hard at work all summer making sure they're ready.

Under the Friday night lights, it's a long-honored tradition, marching bands put on a show at football games and other school events.

While summer usually means pool parties and beach trips, it takes on a different meaning to these band students. 

"We start at 8 o'clock in the morning and at 10:30 a.m., we start to transition inside right when it starts to get hot, just to keep the kids cool," McAllen High School Head Band Director Noel De La Cruz said.

Band students start coming to school about a month before most students, and they need to, because it's not just football games they have to work toward.

There's an 8-minute show that needs to be put on the field before October.

"We're putting in the hours now that we would need to learn the music for an 8-minute show and get their bodies physically ready to march and play because it is a physical sport," De La Cruz said.

Bands from all over the state put in hundreds of hours for their UIL marching shows. All of them have one goal, make it to the state marching competition in San Antonio in November.

"There's a lot of hours that are put in that are needed for the memory and all of the muscle memory that is required to perform the marching show at a high level," De La Cruz said.

It's multitasking like no other. A group of 100-plus students need to march and play simultaneously while doing the exact same thing, at the exact same time as the person next to them. 

"They have to be able to physically play and march at the same time, and it takes a while to get relatively used to that because some of our members are relatively young so they're never marched and played outside before," De La Cruz said.

It's hard work, dedication, a community you won't find anywhere else in the school and at the end of the day, it's all for eight minutes on the field. 

So when you see the marching bands on the field this football season, keep in mind that they've put a lot of work into those shows, and the work continues through November.

Watch the video above for the full story.