bayareafan

A bit late posting here, but congrats Cadets on a great season. I really liked your show this year. Very creative and a very high level of performance by the members. You are a classy organization all around. Lot of changes over the past few years, but you've weathered them and are performing at a very high level. Nice work!!!

Watching on Flo Mandarins really impressed. Can’t wait to see them live. Those guys keep getting a little better every year. That’s going to be one of my favorites this year. BD as always was strong. Their horn line is smokin this year. They have the most distinctive sound of any corps. Love the sound of BD brass. I miss SCV, but Mandarins and BD are still representing the west coast well.

Watched on Flo tonight. Great show. Can’t wait to see them live. They keep getting better every year. I think this is their best show yet. Great to see the progress this corps keeps making.

Seems like a major loss to the activity if they don’t produce a dvd. These licensing issues are ridiculous.

And of course as soon as I say that they seem to have it fixed. Got sound now.

I have no sound on high cam. Flo seems to always have problems.

Up until tonight BD was looking like a real mess to me. I think I was a bit too low to fully appreciate their show in Sac, and what I had seen before on FLO looked so messy to me. Tonights show couldn't have been more different. Watching high cam here on FLO BD finally looked the way I expect BD to look. So much cleaner both visually and musically. The show really sold to me tonight. By far the best tonight and yeah I can finally see how people can see this show might go undefeated. Looks really good now and from what I can see it's the hardest show any corps has on the field this year. Anyone that says BD doesn't move enough is blind. There's a ton of demand out there this year. And this is the best BD horn line in years. Crown may be getting a run for their money this year. BD, you sold me now.

I've only seen them on FLO so far. Looking forward to live this weekend. I have only a few observations. 1. Gold is impressing me a lot. Nice work guys. Great to see the progress. 2. Mandarins seem to have survived the COVID break well. Nice to see them continuing to grow. 3. SCV is clearly talented, but to me there is nothing in their show that it making me go "wow". It's a bit concerning that the ending still isn't there. And design wise, well, so far it isn't selling. I'm a bit SCV fan so I hope this is just an artifact of FLO missing important things. 4. BD has not skipped a beat and looks super impressive. I had them further ahead of SCV. For the first time in a few years their horn section is really impressing me. This is one of those years when I go "wow, that's s smokin horn line". Very impressive this year and the entire show seems modern and refreshing. Will be fun to see live.

I'm liking this show idea. May have to travel to Indianapolis to see this.

I can't believe how good these high school lines have gotten. These guys are just super impressive. I feel like I'm watching a drum corps, but it's just a high school band. I'm kinda blown away by this.

Drum corps has been ahead of the curve on accepting all kinds of people, but that itself might be a good reason for the OP to pursue this project. There are actually still many places where young people who not straight might face discrimination. For example, how many out gay men do you see on high school or college football teams? I think because of that showcasing the drum corps approach to diversity might be a good thing. This is a tough, demanding activity in every way imaginable. And it's an ideal example of an activity that is merit-based. If you aren't good enough, you don't make the corps. And no corps cares the slightest bit about your orientation these days. If there's one thing drum corps proves is that LGBTQ people are just as strong, talented, etc. as their straight counterparts. I wish the rest of the word would be as evolved as drum corps. If so, we'd be way better off.

From what I can see in most respects drum corps has been ahead of the curve in terms of diversity. In terms of membership we see lots of both men and women. People of all colors are widely represented. People from many countries come to the US to march in corps. There are rich kids and some pretty poor kids. And all of these corps now have a good number of out LGBT members - most likely more than we have in the general population. So certainly among the members it seems to me like drum corps is very diverse and I think that is really very important. The staffs are less diverse. They skew male, and they skew caucasian though there are certainly still a lot of female staff members in key roles and a lot of non-caucasian staff members as well. But clearly it is dominated by white males. My instincts are that this is mostly just the natural way that thing have settled out. Sometimes there are biases involved, and other times for whatever reason men will prefer some activities, women others, etc. I expect these staffs will slowly get more diverse. I don't think we should get too uptight about it or try to set quotas or anything because I think that with diverse membership we will - over time - have more diverse staffs. From what I can see - at least among the top tier corps - there seems to be a pretty enlightened group of people in leadership. I truly can't imagine the BlueDevils, or Bluecoats, or most any of the other top corps discriminating on the basis of gender or race for their staffs. I think they just look for whoever they can get that is the best in a particular area. So we're gonna get naturally more diverse staff over time and we will get that more diverse staff because those staff members will be the best in the respective fields. That's a very good thing.

Great job BD. One of the all time great show IMO. Bloooo also had one of the all time great shows I think, so winning this one is quite an accomplishment. Also glad to see that drum score. I’m a big SCV fan as well, but I’ve felt all along that BD really had the best line this year. Glad that finally was recognized the last show of the season.

Well said. These are two of my favorite shows ever. Both incredible corps. Both high class organizations. Both really take care of their members and their fans. I’ll be happy however it turns out and I’ll listen to both these shows over and over once we get official recordings. I guess we could say “Go Blue” and that would kind of cover both.

I was critical of their horn section early in the season. But now I'm getting it. They are not as aggressive as the other horn lines, but they are actually cleaner and I'm starting to really appreciate that now.