Piccolo or Flute?

At my high school, we have 6 piccolo players of our flute section which has about 13 people in it. Obviously, tuning is difficult to handle, but our director supports anyone who can get a piccolo playing a piccolo. This is nice because you can actually hear our section, and everyone knows the flute section is hard to hear. Also, I'm a freshman and I play piccolo.
I like it because-
1.) I don't want to ruin my good flute.. In marching band, your instruments go through basically all weather conditions. Where I live, band camp in July/August is in 100 degree weather, and rehearsals in October are cold and rainy.
2.) It's small, and easier to carry than a flute (even though flutes are already lighter than most instruments.) If you find that you have to use a drill chart when learning marching sets or something like that, you can put the piccolo in your pocket or your sleeve if it's a cold day. That's what we do
3.) Age doesn't always determine skill. Some schools have one piccolo player, usually being an upperclassman like Witch said, but the thing about that is that the upperclassman might not be the best player in the section, and piccolo is what is heard more easily. As a freshman I was placed as first chair in the top band, so even though someone may have been playing longer than I have, that doesn't mean that they have put as much work into their practicing, etc.

The piccolo that I have for marching band is a Yamaha YPC-30. It cost about $900 when I got it. It is definitely not the best piccolo, (I have a wooden piccolo that I use in orchestra that is much nicer) but as you said, it gets the job done. My piccolo has a fully silver-plated body, instead of having a resin body like some. They say the sound travels a bit more on the football field. However, it does get colder much easier when the weather is chilly!

If you don't play piccolo next year, you will probably want to later in high school. It's lots of fun! I hope I helped.

I think that you should grow out more on flute before going to piccolo, I know a lot of bands haveore than one piccolo player but depending on te size you only need one piccolo player for every band of 100; my band has 50 people. So it isn't a necessity to play piccolo, that's more of a luxury. If you don't wan to damage you flute because I also have a solid silver sonare-61 model; use a regular closed hole flute for marching season, maybe one from the school or the district then of you really want to go to piccolo you can practice it hit prepare for it the following years instead of now

I'm a clarinet, but our freshman piccolo hates being constantly told that she's terribly flat or terribly sharp. I would go with flute your first year

piccolo probably wouldn't be good to play in concert band since it wouldnt be needed on every piece