Bonney Lake High School’s Chamber Choir will be taken out to the ball game soon, but they’re not buying peanuts and Cracker Jack: the singing students will be performing the national anthem at Safeco Field. The performance will come before the Mariners’ May 4 game against the Tampa Bay Rays.

The opportunity was the result of a process that began with a chamber choir officer meeting in November to select activities in which the 21 members of the choir could participate.

“We were trying to come up with places to go in Seattle and at first we just thought of going to a baseball game,” treasurer and senior Holly O’Brien said. “Then we thought, why not sing?”

Choir teacher Amy Fuller immediately set to work on an application to put her students on the field. They practiced and recorded two arrangements of the anthem—jazzy and traditional—and recorded them to compact disc in the classroom. Fuller sent the recording packaged with a letter to the Mariners. On April 4 the Mariners replied with an approval to sing the traditional arrangement.

On game day, the choir will leave school for Safeco Field at 1:30 p.m., regaled in their tuxedoes and formal gowns. They’ll arrive to conduct sound check, take a break and then return for the main event before the game begins at 7:30 p.m.

Chamber choir is a class at Bonney Lake, but it is also structured as an extracurricular in the sense that students must audition for spots, elect officers and regularly perform outside of the classroom. The choir has travelled to California and the University of Washington, and they have sung competitively at the Central Choral Festival or to entertain events such as a Christmas party at the Boeing Museum of Flight.

The national anthem is a song the chamber choir performs regularly at school events and assemblies, but the Mariners game will be the largest audience for which any of the singers have performed, either individually or as a group.

“It’s definitely a much bigger deal,” O’Brien said. “We’ve never sung at that big of an event before.”

Students responded with excitement toward the opportunity.

“I thought it was a joke at first,” sophomore Mckayla Troxell said. “Then I thought it would be a great experience for us.”

“I thought it was pretty cool,” freshman Michael Furnstahl said. “I kind of went a little bit crazy when I heard.”

Furnstahl is looking forward to the opportunity to possibly meet outfielder Ichiro Suzuki, he said.

Singers like Katelyn McGraw are putting in extra practice at home to perfect details like facial expressions during the song.

Fuller is sure the national anthem is a moment none of the choir singers will forget, she said. She still remembers singing at Safeco Field with the Central Washington University choir in college, she said.

“It’s a pretty big honor, particularly because we’re a 3A school,” she said. “To be chosen as a smaller school, it’s very elite.”