On Jan. 1, the South Kitsap High School Marching Band will play in the 2010 Rose Parade. The Parade’s history goes way back.

Before there was a Rose Bowl Game, there was the Tournament of Roses Parade, staged in 1890 by members of Pasadena’s Valley Hunt Club. These former residents of the East and Midwest were eager to showcase their new home’s milder weather.
“In New York, people are buried in snow,” member Charles F. Holder is said to have announced at a club meeting. “Here our flowers are blooming and our oranges are about to bear. Let’s hold a festival to tell the world about our paradise.”
Set in the City of Pasadena, the festival included marching bands, motorized floats and flower bedecked horse-and-carriages. There were games on the town lot which was renamed Tournament Park in 1900. These included ostrich races, bronco busting demonstrations and a race between a camel and an elephant. The elephant won.

Eastern newspapers began to cover the event, which grew until, in 1895, it became too much for the hunt club to handle. That year, the Tournament of Roses Association was formed and has managed the festival ever since.
In 1902, a football game was added to the festivities. It was the first post-season college football game ever held, Stanford University versus the University of Michigan. Stanford was thumped 49-0 and gave up in the third quarter.
For the next several years, the Tournament of Roses Association dumped football in place of Roman-style chariot races. But in 1916, the association reprised the football game, and it’s been a tradition ever since.
Within a few years, attendance at the game outgrew the stands in Tournament Park. The Tournament’s 1920 President William L. Leishman, spearheaded the construction of a “modern” bowl-type football stadium, similar to the Yale Bowl, in Pasadena’s Arroyo Seco area. The new stadium hosted its first New Year’s football game in 1923 and soon earned the nickname “The Rose Bowl.”
Nicknamed “The Granddaddy of Them All,” the Rose Bowl Game has been a sellout since 1947. That year’s contest was the first game played under the Tournament’s exclusive agreement with the Big Ten and Pac-10 conferences.
These days the Tournament of Roses Parade has gone high tech, with floats using computerized animation and made with exotic natural materials from around the world, including — you guessed it — thousands of roses.

The 2010 Rose Bowl Game
The 96th Rose Bowl Game, following the Rose Bowl Parade on Jan. 1, pits the Ohio State Buckeyes against the Oregon Ducks. Coverage begins at 1:30 p.m. (PST) on ABC and ESPN radio.
The Rose Bowl will also be the site of the 2010 Citi BCS (Bowl Championship Series) National Championship Game on Jan. 7 featuring the Number 2 BCS ranked Texas Longhorns versus the No. 1 BCS ranked Alabama Crimson Tide. The game will be broadcast on ABC.

Source: Tournament of Roses Association

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