Fran Haring

This reminds me of a scene early on in "The Manchurian Candidate."

A sad day indeed. Truly the end of an era.

Can't predict the future as to whether this new all-age thing will work long-term... but I'm hoping that perhaps the all-age corps will come out a bit earlier in the years to come, given the shorter timeline. And by "come out a bit earlier"... I mean come out reasonably fully prepared. Just call me Mr. Perfect World. 😆

Yep. My local-circuit junior corps from NJ, 1970s, our director wanted nothing to do with DCI. The corps survived through the 1980 season before disbanding. And DCI was not to blame. The corps simply ran out of money and members.

Haven't read this whole thread, so this might have been mentioned already... but the Cadets losing that USBands revenue stream could not have been helpful. I know... Captain Obvious here.

One of the best posts I've ever read on any of these forums.

I sometimes have wondered what Mr. Cook... a total gentleman and hugely successful business person... might have been thinking in those DCI meetings when Star was around, listening to some directors, whose corps could barely pay their bills, pontificating on how DCI should be run. LOL. "Get me outta here!!!" 😂

And Bill Cook in Indiana.

Bob would be a great choice!

The USBands folks... Sean King, Justin Heimbecker and the rest... were great to work with, and I agree, those scripts were a big help!

Heh... at a YEA gig in MD I worked for several years in the 2000s, a guy would come up to me after the show every year and complain about the DCI corps. "Not what it used to be"... etc., etc. I wondered why this guy bothered paying to see this show every year. It was not like his attendance would magically turn back the clock to 1970. 😂

OK... regarding this whole "announcer script and so forth" stuff, some background from the guy who did the DCA gig for... well... decades, and apologies for this being long: For years, I wrote my own script for the DCA regular-season shows, prelims and finals that I worked, simply because no one else was doing it, unlike DCI, which provides those scripts to their announcers. NOT a knock on the DCA staff... remember, they were ALL part-time at their positions. (When I worked DCI shows, it was nice to have that script work done for me.) In 2009, a friend who had worked for DCI was doing PR work for DCA, so he wrote the prelims/finals script for me. And starting in 2011, when DCA pulled me off the prelims show for reasons that have never been fully explained to me (my 2011-2018 DCA years are a story for another day, and I will leave it at that here...LOL), my friend Steve Anderman, who was now the prelims announcer, began writing the scripts for both of us, and did a great job. The prelims scripts, regardless of who was writing them, always had drop-in announcements about what else was on the schedule that weekend... the alumni show, finals schedule, etc. All the years I worked either DCA or DCI gigs, if I had a question about a pronunciation, etc., I would make sure to ask for help. And yes, I plead guilty to making some absolutely boneheaded comments over the microphone through the years... it's a live show, and sometimes stuff happens. It sucks, but it happens. To any announcer. I also appreciated the confidence some folks had in me to... well... "be Fran" when working a show. LOL. My YEA gigs, my friends there (one in particular) would hand me the script and tell me I had the leeway to use my own style when appropriate. I didn't see any DCA shows this year, in person or on Box5, so I have no idea what went on in Rochester, and it ain't my business anymore. I'll just say... announcing drum corps is nowhere near as easy as it might seem to the armchair quarterbacks out there.

Some were there the Thursday of that weekend. Even if the 2024 show is "Saturday only"... there's still the travel involved to get there. The corps won't be pulling into town Saturday AM and heading right to the stadium. LOL

I hope that's the case!

Along the lines of what Jeff and W said earlier... I hope the compressed season will more or less force the corps to put an achievable product on the field earlier than they have in years past. Shows that are unfinished, or barely finished in mid-July... and thus just starting to really get it together by the time the new DCA title show happens... might not make much of a good impression on the DCI fans who come out to see what the all-age product is all about. I have no skin in this game anymore, so I hope all goes well for my friends still involved with DCA.