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Wisconsin isn't a real strong state when it comes to marching bands, but there are a good number of competing units. There are 34 bands scheduled to compete in our state championships in October. Out of that, 19 of the bands are from what I would consider to be the Milwaukee area. The remaining 15 bands are scattered across the state from the Madison area all the way up to the northwoods of Wisconsin. There are additional bands that aspire to march competitively, but various reasons are holding them back. The only thing that might work in favor of a drum corps show is the fact that there used to be so many of them in the region during the days of DCM, and now there's only a couple. For example, the season always opened in the Appleton/Menasha area for Americanos home show. Usually there were a handful of other shows scattered about the area as well. Now days there's only a couple shows in the state, so people may be more willing to venture out and travel a little ways to attend one.

The turf at Lambeau Field is still natural grass with a bit of a twist. They injected synthetic fibers into the base to stop typical wear and tear such as divots. Beyond that, it's still a natural Kentucky Bluegrass turf that could potentially suffer from a full corps show. They still have a high tech heating system under the field to maintain a consistent soil temperature during cold weather. In addition, they also added an artificial lighting system in recent years that extends the growing season into early December.

Pioneer parades: 10:00a Cedarburg WI Parade 12:00p Cudahy, WI Parade 2:00p Shorewood, WI Parade 4:00p Hales Corners, WI Parade

And to clarify the Pioneer(s) issue. We once went by the name Pioneers, so it's not as offensive as you might think. However, the "s" was dropped from the name several decades ago.

I will get in before the close on this one... Pioneer is still looking for members to round out many of the sections within the corps. There has been strong interest from individuals throughout the country, but we're still working to convert that "interest" into marching members. A lot of people are excited by our 2013 production, and the positive feedback has been rolling in. A majority of our staff is returning from 2012 and we look to build on things from there. If you are interested, or know of anyone that might be interested in marching the 2013 season: Request Information about 2013 Our next camp: March 8th - 10th Cudahy, Wisconsin March Camp Information

Agreed. If necessary, get a medical order from the eye doc that says that sunglasses are required.

Contacts all the way from my perspective. Talk to your eye care practitioner about "AIR OPTIX® NIGHT & DAY® AQUA". They're FDA approved for 30 days continuous wear. I used to have a lot of eye irritations and issues. Once I found these contacts, they all went away. I also found that the more I poked at my eye putting contacts in & taking them out, the more issues that I had... especially on tour when conditions weren't always the most "sanitary". As a general statement though... definitely discuss it with your eye care practitioner. Explain to them what you're doing. They may have some other suggestions as far as contact choice.

Yes and no... While I agree that they should have a voice, the "interests" of the top 12 corps don't always align with the interests of the bottom 12 corps in World Class. In fact, I would even be willing to say that they rarely do outside of the most broad sense of serving youth. The "interests" differ even further when you venture into the Open Class level.

Pioneer 1997 - Riverdance. Extremely difficult book even after being hit with the fire hose.

Thank you to everyone who has voted... There's still a little time left if you have not. Please take a moment and vote! Every vote counts! Vote for Pioneer!!!!

The licensing process can take a long time depending on the content... so much so that you would almost have to start the process a year or more in advance to get all of the necessary licensing in place prior to the season. When you don't know exactly what direction a show is going to go, that's hard to do. Add in the fact that it's not unheard of for a corps to replace a whole song/segment during the course of the season. How do you account for that?

This is probably the best explanation of the situation. DCP has very little control over what ads appear on the website. It's mostly controlled by the factors explained above. For example, I'm seeing ads for US Cellular right now because I recently visited their website to price out new phone contracts. The ads truly are based off of your browsing history.

I fully agree with this. Over the course of the past couple years, I've heard plenty of alumni complain about the lack of retreats and the overall way that shows end/conclude now days. Retreat/grand finale was a true spectacle that many in the stands looked forward to. Similar to the opening or closing ceremonies at the Olympics, retreat was the ultimate show of pageantry and sportsmanship. Yes, there were some people that made a hasty exit to get out of the parking lot before the other spectators. However, for the most part a majority of the crowd stayed put for the scores and so forth. One option would be to make this an "add on" that the show promoter can choose to have at their show. This would allow them to research the sound/noise ordinances to see if it would be permissible.

Definitely not true. Blue Devils maybe had 3 or 4 show housing sites AT MOST last year. They may not have been at the show site, but I'll guarantee you that they weren't out in the middle of the boondocks either. Corps going on at the beginning of the show are at a disadvantage. Nothing like having to end rehearsal at 2:30pm on a show day to pack up, travel to the show site, warm up and make it to the gate on time. Then, because you were the first corps at the show, you end up getting parked in by all of the other corps that arrived at the show site after you. So, you end up leaving last, arriving at the next housing site later than the higher ranking corps, and then start the cycle over again. Ah yes... the life of a lower placing corps!

I see where you're coming from, but how many of these kids had access to such documents while on tour? Many of these kids hooked up with other corps before ever returning home. I know I never carried receipts on tour with me showing monthly payments or anything of that nature. I've seen a lot of corps packing lists, and nowhere on them did it list "bring all receipts from your payments just in case we fold mid tour and you have to go to another corps". I suppose their parents could have tried to get said documents to the corps, but how do you handle the college age members that have the receipts filed in any one of a number of locations that may not be accessible to their parents? In hindsight, perhaps Teal should have prepared a letter for each of the corps members that was in "good standing" and handed that out before releasing the corps from their last housing site. If you didn't get a letter, you weren't eligible to march with another corps. Corps could have been informed to ask for them and only accept members that had a valid letter. Then again, there are some corps that don't care... I've said for a while that there needs to be a central database that's run by DCI (or a DCI approved independent 3rd party) that all corps members get recorded into. If a member is paid in full, their record is marked as paid. If it's not paid in full, their record flagged as being delinquent. It's as simple as that to ensure that members are paid up before going on to another corps.

Unless the members disclosed that they still owed dues to Teal Sound, that type of information has proven in the past to be difficult to obtain... especially in the middle of the tour. There also was apparently a blur between members who "didn't pay their dues" and those that were granted "scholarships" to cover their dues (aka didn't have to pay). Some of the members that were looking for spots were under the impression that it was perfectly "ok" that they hadn't paid dues... Also, to touch on the top 7 corps... they had very few to no holes to fill. I'm not sure exactly how they were supposed to help out. Cadets had a baritone opening which was posted right after Teal left tour, but other than that I believe they had a full corps. Not much you can do when you have a full corps.

Impeccable is a pretty strong word to use (and live up to). However, we try our best to watch out for all of the members. I personally have witnessed more than one occasion where Roman or another staff member has gone far out the way to make sure that our members are safe and accounted for. In fact, the past week Roman himself has been watching over the last of our out of country students to make sure they have a good time and make it to all of their necessary travel connections. All of that said... stuff happens. You can put all of the safeguards in place, but still have a member or two fall through the cracks. Even on the busiest of days on tour, there's still time (albeit very limited) for members to find ways to get into trouble if they really want to. This is a little unrelated, but proves the point. On my high school's band trips, the band director and a couple chaperones always slept in the hallway of the hotel to make sure band members didn't go between rooms after curfew. It seemed like a pretty foolproof system. Unfortunately, a couple band members realized that the distance between balconies for each room wasn't "too" far (it probably was about 4 or 5 feet). A couple of them ended up jumping from one balcony to the next room over. If I recall correctly, one student actually made it several rooms over before hotel security became aware of the situation and took immediate action. The situation could have been tragic if one of the band members fell. It was a situation that nobody ever could have predicted. Needless to say, when booking future band trips... the director made sure to specify rooms that didn't have balconies.

SDCA = Small Drum Corps Association. They're a relatively new drum corps circuit that performs primarily in gymnasiums and fieldhouses across the country. They just started up a couple new regions this year, including one in California. Pioneer had the pleasure of performing at their Manitowoc, WI show back in July. Blue Saints and Legends also made appearances at their shows this season. Find out more here: SDCA Website

Pioneer ended up this season with only 22 scored competitions. We did suffer a couple early season rain outs, but even with those this was the lowest number of shows that we've been scored at since the late 80's. Clearly, that was not a benefit to us... However, we face the unique circumstance of always going on early at shows. On show days we're at the gate before the Blue Devils even get to the show site sometimes. If you work backwards from there through the day, that early performance time really cuts into our rehearsal time. There were show days where we're lucky to get 4 or 5 hours of rehearsal in. Cutting back on the number of shows does afford us more rehearsal time, but in all reality it probably just offsets the lost rehearsal time by always going on first.

Reading all of the open letters and posts over the past couple days about how the activity has changed had me thinking... A couple weekends ago I had my mom in town for a visit. It just happened to be the weekend of the Atlanta regional. We didn't have anything exciting planned for a majority of the day on Saturday, so just for the fun of it I hooked up the laptop and had the Fan Network live stream running in the living room throughout the day. We made a point of watching Pioneer since that was the corps I marched with for 8 years. After that, the stream just ran and we checked in periodically. We didn't have a schedule of corps to follow, and really didn't make an effort to see any other corps except Madison Scouts since that was always one of her favorites. To my surprise, on a couple occasions my mom was able to identify the corps on the field by nothing more the style of music they were playing or the sound they projected. She was literally able to identify Phantom Regiment, Blue Devils and a couple other corps from a different room of the house just by hearing the beginning of their shows. At the end of the night, she actually asked that we go back and re-watch many of the last corps of the evening. In full disclosure... My mom hasn't been to a show since Stillwater in July of 2000. She did catch the ESPN broadcasts a couple years ago. In addition, a couple corps (including Cadets) stayed in her hometown the last time DCI was in Madison. Outside of that, her exposure to drum corps has been next-to-nothing over the past 12 years. Some of that was due to me aging-out, but largely it was due to my dad's declining health due to Alzheimer's. She always talked about going to shows, but caring for him took all of her time and there simply wasn't time for an activity that gave us all so much over the years. While there's no disputing that the activity has changed, the fact that she was able to identify corps without even seeing them is proof that the activity hasn't changed that much. Many of the corps have stayed true to what they have done for years. And while other corps have spread their wings and tried different avenues, she still found them enjoyable. She still connected with the corps and at the evening was grateful for the fact that I went to the "extreme effort" of putting the show on the TV (Gotta love moms! It's really only 1 cable, but hey...). If all goes well, we're going to make it a point to get her back to at least one drum corps show in 2013. So I guess you can count on at least one extra fan back in the seats next year in light of all of those who are "resigning" as fans.

It is what it is... I'm more than used to scores bouncing around unpredictably. Having been with Pioneer for 20 years, I've seen it all. It's just hard to put into perspective for anyone (members, parents, recruiting, etc...) that they have their best show of the year and the score drops 3 points from their last show and they're back to what they were scoring two weeks ago. On to next year...

While I get where you're coming from, scores are supposed to come from performance in relation to the criteria outlined on the sheets. Pioneer's performance/scores was a known and consistent factor. They've been scored on World Class sheets all season and should have continued an upward trend in scoring just off of pure practice and repetition. Introducting Open Class corps to the mix shouldn't have changed what Pioneer was scoring over the past two weeks. Just sucks to look at the kids and say... oh yeah, you busted your buns the past two weeks... Better Every Day... but your score went down.

That score is ridiculous... I'm sorry. I usually don't let personal feelings get into my posts, but how does Pioneer's score actually go down from Atlanta??? Which was two weeks ago???

I can't reveal what next year's show is yet, but what I can tell you is they've been working on it since early July. A lot of thought has gone into it for sure...

Gold appears to have jumped over Genesis and 7th Regiment.