BATON ROUGE — Ten years after the Great Flood of 2016 upended the start of LSU's football season, the Golden Band from Tigerland is reflecting on how it pulled off a brand new halftime show in less than a week to honor a community hit hard by the disaster.

The Golden Band from Tigerland has marched through the gates of Tiger Stadium for more than 125 years. In 2016, the band was also navigating its first season under new leadership.

"In 2016, that was the first year that Dennis Llinas was the Tiger Band director and Kelvin Jones was just hired as the assistant director," said Damon Talley.

When the floods hit Baton Rouge in August of that year, thousands were displaced, including students hoping to join the band. Many arrived at camp having just dealt with the damage at home.

"I remember students came up and they're like, I'm so glad to be here and not be at home, dealing with, you know, pulling the sheetrock off the walls or drying out my house," said Dennis Llinas.

"We were also being sensitive to students who didn't have homes to go to, especially for our commuter students," said Kelvin Jones. "Life was just different."

The flooding also forced the band to move its practice location. The field outside the Tiger Band Hall on the north side of campus was completely underwater, so the band had to rehearse at the University Recreation Intramural Fields on the opposite side of campus.

"Just that change, in and of itself, was a big one because we had to figure out transportation, we gotta get a scissor lift over there, we had to actually paint the field so we can have the right kind of feel," Talley said.

As camp continued, the directors felt they couldn't move forward without acknowledging what the community was going through. Llinas put it simply.

"We should do something for the flood," Llinas said.

Talley brought the idea of a halftime show tribute to the other directors, but the timing was a real challenge.

"So I came in and talked with Dennis and Kelvin, I said this is crazy, I think we should do a halftime show for this," said Talley. "And maybe for a couple seconds, you could hear crickets in the room, because we were all thinking the same thing, yes we should, but... we have a great show that's almost all on the field that we wrote and this is like a week away."

Jones described the decision as a complete overhaul with the home opener just days out.

"We literally had a meeting and it was like wholesale change and do this brand new halftime show for our first home game," Jones said.

Llinas said the stakes of that first home game were clear to everyone involved. "We knew that first game at home was going to be important to our community," he said.

With less than a week before LSU's home opener against Jacksonville State, all 325 band members learned a brand new show. The performance spelled out "Unbroken" on the field as a tribute to the community.

The response was immediate. Talley received texts from people he didn't expect to hear from, including a letter from Scott Ballard, who was the chair of the Board of Supervisors at the time, thanking the band for the show.

People approached Llinas after the performance with their own stories from the flood.

"A lot of people just came up, shook my hand, and said thank you so much for doing it for us and they would have a story accompanying with it, you know, we lost our home completely and seeing this and being back in Tiger Stadium, really gets us to connect and realise that everything is going to be okay for us," Llinas said.

Jones said the moment still stands out a decade later.

"With all the things that you have to deal with in a normal year, you have this set of adversity and to see the students rise above the adversity, not only rise to the occasion but exceed it, 10 years later we're talking about this halftime show," Jones said.

Now, with a new football season underway, the Golden Band from Tigerland is marking 10 years since that performance and the flood that inspired it.