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The 47 members of the Simon Fraser University Pipe Band – currently the world’s best pipe band - are superb pipers and drummers who also mesh well, something Pipe Major Terry Lee calls the chemistry factor.

“The players in our band are here because they’re extremely talented musicians and because they’re a good fit,” says Lee. “They come from all ages, and from different walks of life.

“Over the years we’ve become a destination band, and our band has a few players who’ve joined us from other parts of the world.”

Every player has a story. Here are just a few:

• Colin McWilliams is a former wrestler who showed early promise on the mats as a teen – placing fourth in the world in juvenile competition. He went on to compete for a few years for SFU (he graduated in 1998 with a BA in history) and the Burnaby Wrestling Club, but eventually bowed to the lure of the pipes.

As a child, his father, Angus McWilliams, current pipe major of the Vancouver Police Pipe Band, would post music sheets to the fridge and every morning before breakfast he practiced his pipes.

“Colin knew how to read music before he could read sentences,” Angus recalls. “It was a ritual in our house,” adds Colin, a North Vancouver resident who works as a psychiatric nurse at St. Paul’s Hospital. “I’ve been at it ever since.”

McWilliams joined the band in 1996 and rejoined in 2000, after playing a stint with rival band Field Marshal Montgomery from Northern Ireland.

• Xavier Boderiou is one of France’s top pipers. A recent addition to the band in the fall of 2008, he travels from Brittany to perform with the band and spend summers getting ready for the World Pipe Band Championships in August.

“I joined the band because SFU is one of the bands you hear about since the first year you learn the bagpipes,” says Boderiou, who started playing in 1994. “SFU always sounds great, the band plays very musical medleys and has been very competitive for many years.”

Boderiou spends a week or two with the band in the spring for concerts and practices, then returns to teach in a summer school called Piping Hot Summer Drummer (PHSD.net) and to prepare with the band for the Worlds.

“We have a strong piping tradition as well back in Brittany with 130 bands now, called bagads. Bagads were created in the 50s on the Scottish pipe bands basis but with a bombard section (a Breton instrument).” Boderiou has played for four years with the Bagad Cap Caval – and has won the Bagad Championships in Brittany for three straight years.

•At age six and living in Anchorage, Alaska, Will Nichols learned about bagpipes from a video his parents brought back from a holiday in Scotland and promptly told them he want to learn to play. His mother, Patti, managed to find an instructor (“in Anchorage, of all places,” she says.) At the age of eight, he attended a workshop at the Master of Scottish Arts in Seabeck, Washington and met SFU Pipe Sergeant Jack Lee.

Lee promptly took the young Nichols under his wing and began a long distance teaching arrangement - exchanging video tapes of each other - while Will made a monthly trek from Alaska and stayed at the Lee’s Surrey residence.

“We made it work,” says Patti, who was diagnosed with cancer when Will was 10. “The Lee household became a ‘safe haven’ during this time, he was treated like part of the family, joining in with Lee’s three piping sons,” she recalls.

Will, now studying to become a dentist, was invited to join the Robert Malcolm Memorial Band in 2002. The family eventually re-settled in Blaine, Washington to make it work. He has been with the Grade 1 band for the past four years.

Patti is now a 10-year cancer survivor and volunteers her time with the band. “I really wanted to give something back to Jack for all he has done for us,” she says.

“I think most people consider the band to be like a family, and much of that is to the credit of Jack and his brother Terry.”

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