Mitchell Cash and Ana Cunningham, two alumni of BGSU and its Falcon Marching Band (FMB), got engaged during the FMB’s alumni performance at this year’s Homecoming.
Cash and Cunningham, who both graduated from BGSU in 2024, were high school sweethearts from nearby Perrysburg High School and were both on the FMB’s drumline. This connection, Cash said, inspired the setting for the surprise proposal.
“We obviously both loved BG, and we loved the drumline and everything, so that kind of sparked the idea for me to do the proposal at Homecoming,” Cash said. “It’s kind of a full circle thing. We met with drums, I proposed and we get to kind of start the rest of our lives with drums and everything, so that’s kind of the full circle moment.”
Cash, who said he’d been planning to propose to Cunningham at Homecoming for almost nine months, said the surprise took a lot of coordination between friends, family and former classmates.
“I had this plan for almost nine months, and then it kind of became a realistic plan six months before Homecoming happened,” Cash said. “…part of the planning process was getting the band director, our drumline instructor and all of my friends involved to make sure that they all knew that [they could] be a part of this.”
As the alumni performance winded down, the drumline fell into a cadence unfamiliar to Cunningham. She said she didn’t know what was happening until it hit her.
“When the roll started…I joined in because I’m like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to look dumb,’” Cunningham said. “The two guys that were standing next to me, who are both good friends of mine…leaned in and said, ‘Take your drum off.’ I had no idea what was going on, and it didn’t really click until I walked forward and saw [Cash] standing there.”
Cash was surprised by the number of people present, but he said the bigger crowd didn’t stop the proposal from being everything he dreamed it would be.
“Normally, our pre-flight FMB performance…is a little bit more just family and friends watching, but [the band] connected the show with that Phil Vassar concert, so it was a lot more people than I anticipated,” Cash said. “It ended up being great, though. I’m so thankful she put her trust in me that I was doing the right thing because I wouldn’t have done something like that if I didn’t think it would be perfect.”
Cunningham agreed the experience was perfect.
“I was very impressed. He doesn’t do well with surprises, but he actually managed to keep this a surprise” she said.
The couple now lives together in Columbus, with Cash working full time at Honda and Cunningham attending graduate school. Cash said their secret to post graduation success is remembering the BG community they came from.
“Always remembering and always holding true to our original values as a couple is one of the most important things we can do,” Cash said. “We started in drums…and that’s always going to be a part of us. BG will always be a part of our story.”
Cunningham agreed with Cash and added communication as a definite key to success.
“We’re a lot busier now, so I think just being able to accept that [and] still working together to maintain good communication and everything…pretty much gets you through anything,” Cunningham said.
As for the wedding, the couple said they were planning to take some time to just enjoy being engaged.
“I think that we both are super busy,” Cash said. “Now we’re at a point where we get to call each other fiance, and we get to just enjoy that for a while, so we can let the big next step of calling each other husband and wife be something a little further down the road.”
The couple said while nothing about their wedding is concrete yet, they know their friends, family and the FMB will be involved.
“Obviously, I trusted a lot of those people with a big secret in my life, so I’m sure a lot of them will be at the wedding,” Cash said. “At the end of the proposal, Professor Waters actually was just like, ‘Well, Mitch and Ana, do you guys need the Falcon Marching Band at your wedding,’ and I think my response was, ‘I’d love to, but I’m not sure we can afford that many people at the wedding.’”
