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Tweet reads: "Heavy" More photos with details that aren't leaks: Concert euphonium solo: Concert horn solo:

Carolina Crown has held Spring Training at Gardner-Webb University since 2007! GWebb is small school in the very small town of Boiling Springs, NC. Alex is on staff again this year at Crown! And 2007 -- what a year that was:

Crown Media has a LOT of 2023 content at their smugmug site.

Cavaliers limped in to Finals in 2015, too. They had a big enough outage due to rotovirus that they didn’t even take the field at Southeastern Championship Regional in Atlanta. And according to med team i met on the road with them in 2017, the full corps didn’t get back on the field until Prelims. All speculation til the first salute. I’ll be in Lisle on July 2 … with my former Cavs DM sitting with me for a change. After 7 years of Atlanta CV/Cavaliers, it will be nice to have him in the stands with us…😎

I don't get the impression that it's show-related. The post said something about anniversary of Jurassic Park. Though they have announced a small change to the guard unis...

I always love people that have slotted everyone before they have even seen the first show. Not only that but their reviews...lets say their creds are a little sus.

I predict Crown will have my favorite show this season for the first time in awhile.

Also have two groups coming back that can move placements around.

We want Joan

I honestly don't see the big thing about hiding the props prior to the first show anyway.

From their Facebook page hiding the props, hence the shirt.

It's certainly nothing to balk at. This is from a public account by the MM I know, let me know if you need me to take it down but I don't think it counts as s a leak.

Very few illnesses noted at camp so far this year, so there's that. Honestly, they didn't have the closer all year, and that tanked them as much as Covid. Didn't they not get rights to music or something at the last minute? Last year's design was a hangover from the exhibition show they did the previous year. They didn't recruit guard well, and there were other issues behind the scenes that are not present this year. That staff is now gone. It was much more than Covid, which SCV and Phantom Regiment both suffered through yet still did ok. I just want to make it clear that the membership did everything they were asked to do, and this is a new year. I fully expect them to be top 6.

people grumbling about "how many chances does this regime get" are only looking at the placement. there's a whole slew of other things in funding and operations that this regime does better than anyone. and it saved this corps from financial collapse and folding. id like those who cant see that component at the meetings and step up with their finance and operations planin addition to bringing a show team to say "here's what we plan to do for success both on and off the field"

Agree. Though I think 2019 was darn good...and that brass line was smokin' good. The issues with 2022 came about due to a convergence of things. Once they realized that changes were needed (early season) I think they started planning, but then the corps was hit with so much Covid that they couldn't teach anything new at rehearsals with nearly 40+ people out due to Covid or quarantine purposes. With so many holes during those rehearsals about all you can do is rep what you have and do stand-still concerts. By the time they got everyone back all they could really do was clean with maybe a few minor changes. It was really good come finals but it certainly was not the show they were hoping to have. The current design team they have is top notch. I expect a great show from them this year and fingers crossed they stay healthy all summer.

My lord the podcast makes you want to believe they're going to come out blazing like the early 2000s

Cry more

…Where You’ll Find Me I: “Familiar Places”: The Rutter Gloria II: “75”: Saucedo original in 7 and 5 III: “In your Heart”: the Ballad is the closer with an allegro ending to the show watch the podcast

Holy hell, I don’t know what’s going on here but I love it. I worked on the Barney crew for three years back in the late 90’s and I’m pretty sure I had a few fever dreams like this.

Love that Rutter Tune..89 Cavies my favorite of all time from them

Next level doesn't describe it.

Thanks!

I'm pretty sure Tom Blair is still directing the finals videos. He's a treasure. As for Flo, they're basically getting off-the-street videographers to do shows. If I were a corps director who cared about my fans, I'd have one of my media team make up a cue sheet for a basic 2 camera setup (high cam and field level) and send it to Flo. Maybe it would help the directors running the board on regular season shows to at least cue his videographers on where to point next and when to switch cameras! Tom does this research on his own (I think) to make sure things are good at finals.

5 season results. corps avg placement appearances Blue Devils 1.40 5 Bluecoats 2.70 5 Vanguard 3.00 5 Carolina Crown 3.60 5 Cavaliers 5.80 5 Boston Crusaders 6.30 5 Cadets 7.00 5 Blue Knights 7.75 4 Blue Stars 8.40 5 Phantom Regiment 9.60 5 Mandarins 10.00 3 Academy 11.00 1 Colts 11.00 1 Crossmen 11.00 4 Madison Scouts 12.00 1 Troopers 12.00 1 Just an aside -- this is a simple google sheet with one sheet containing a "database" like this corps year place Cavaliers 2006 1 Phantom Regiment 2006 2 Blue Devils 2006 3 and the resulting table is a pivot table on the average of the place field and count of the place field. Ties are averaged so a tie for 2 corps in 5th place will give both corps a place of "5.5" instead of arbitrarily breaking the tie with GE or something. This keeps your average placement accurate relative to the rest of the data.

Baloney. That was true 15-20 years ago, when obtaining all of the mandatory rights and coordination licenses was still a fairly new industry, but not anymore. I can assure you that many of the "heavy hitters" started asking for this season's rights before last season was even concluded. And I doubt any of the Top 6 had any unresolved licensing issues after about March of this year. At the latest.

Well, that explains my general feeling I was getting from the staff. I'll admit it... it frustrated me to the point where I wasn't exactly myself. But right now we have an awesome staff. I'm so excited to hear some Sausado/Cavies original work again!

Thank you sir! I'll be honest, I have it on my list of things to do... but I ended up celebrating Father's day yesterday. Thank you for posting the rep!

I can quickly supply Cavaliers . 2016- 5th 2017-4th 2018-6th 2019-5th 2022- 9th Average = 6.0

I have plenty of Madison alumni friends. I won't air dirty laundry here, but this administration has hardly done anything to garner alumni support. I know people who supported the corps but no longer do because of the of this administration. Alumni support is so essential. Please don't mistake this as argumentative or condescending - it's neither. I'm merely trying to perhaps learn here, but I really don't understand where you are coming from or how you can accept the current competitive state of the corps. To me - this is the heart of the problem - those, including the BOD, supporting an administration that doesn't seem to know how to design a show or compete. When I marched (a top corps) it was always such a big deal the first time we saw Madison every year. It didn't matter if we beat them last year, or had already beaten a corps that had already beaten them during the current season, we were always filled with nervous excitement the first time we saw them. Now the rivals they had back then don't give them a second thought today. That is very sad. I miss Madison. I miss Madison being a competitive force. Cleary, the choice isn't financial health or competitive success. It can be both. So they are are doing a good job financially - that's great, but they have been a complete and total failure from a competitive standpoint. That's just so beyond unacceptable IMO. I really hope they prove me wrong a few weeks. As much as I HATED when Madison beat us, they (along with Vanguard) were always the corps I respected the most, and Madison is now a non-finalist and Vanguard is gone. Truly heartbreaking on both fronts.

Might be in Austin on 7/20!

But they have made their repertoire known, and their show design, and their uniform. I’m good with that.

The reason they hold off on music announcements is because of not having the needed rights to the tunes.

As a Crown honk I love the Crown comment. But were I to make predictions, I might group things slightly differently at the top: 1: BD 2-4 Crown, Bluecoats, Boston IMHO.... Consistency matters and Bluecoats have demonstrated it. To win you have to design a show that lets you win multiple captions (including GE) from BD and/or have other corps (preferably 2 or 3 others!) win some and have your corps finish 2nd in those captions. Not having SCV competing this season will certainly mix up the math a bit. You have to prove you're not just a flash in the pan to the judges before they'll consider you as a champion . Average Finals Placement (past 10 seasons) corps avg placement appearances Blue Devils 1.40 10 Carolina Crown 3.20 10 Bluecoats 3.60 10 Vanguard 3.90 10 Cadets 5.00 10 Cavaliers 6.20 10 Boston Crusaders 7.40 10 Phantom Regiment 7.60 10 Blue Knights 8.22 9 Blue Stars 9.44 9 Madison Scouts 9.83 6 Mandarins 10.00 3 Academy 11.00 1 Colts 11.00 1 Spirit of Atlanta 11.33 3 Crossmen 11.43 7 Troopers 12.00 1

When's the first Madison spirit head to head? I think that will be an interesting one to watch

The reasoning which is usually offered revolves around having your concept demolished online before it's ever seen by a judge. This is silly because if armchair critics can ruin your chances, maybe you should have done a better job designing your product. The second reason usually involves creating excitement at the first public performance. While this may have been true when printed media was the method typical fans learned of shows, it's certainly not hard today to search social media and find plenty of leaks. In fact even in the days of printed media, cassette tapes were copied and passed everywhere. I think it's mostly because corps administrations like to imagine they are the holders of the secret knowledge. Again -- silly -- but...well...

It would seem the more info put out before the season starts helps the judges to get an understanding on the theme. I like how the Cavies explained just about everything they're doing/playing which will sure make fans wanting to see them soon.

I can confidently say the community does embrace it. Many locals have joined the Facebook support group to follow after they leave and look forward to them coming back every year. Plus Scoopy Dos (and the place that took it over) are a staple for free blocks.

Everyone below SCV is going to automatically move up this year.

I honestly think it's silly. Same with corps not announcing their repertoires before the season. It's such a small activity with such a small following I am not sure why it's such a big deal to keep things secret.

Absolutely. I just mentioned this on the 2023 prediction thread but with shorter seasons it will be important for design teams to have something that can work out of the gate. They can refine from there. But if they don't have a show closer ready to go (as you noted above) or they take too many chances and the show needs major rewrites out of the gate then that corps will play catchup all season.

I agree, Cavies show design out of the gate was not good last season. However very few corps will have a perfect design out of the gate and so while the show design was not what they wanted they were prevented from making those changes once 47+ members of the corps had to be quarantined from rehearsals. At that point all you can do is rehearse what you have. On the flip side with only 6 week seasons now (and they could get shorter) it will be imperative that staff and design have a strong and executable game plan for a short season. Show design has to mostly hit early on. It's a tough thing to do for sure. Designing a show is one thing, bringing it to life on the field is another. It's a difficult process and very few ( or a group of people) can design something great or perfect right out of the gate without tweaks, trial and error, and sometimes major re-writes. If your show needs the later (big re-writes) you will have scoring issues. The show could be loved or liked but from a scoring perspective that corps will play catch-up all summer.

this is still just as cool today

I think it's ironic that the guard was always a debate the last 10 or so years of Madison for the gender reasons. Everyone said most males would go march co-ed and then the ones that wanted all male would primarily go to Cavies and leftovers to Madison. I am by far no guard person but I will say I think they benefitted the most there when going co-ed.

But in the end every corps dealt with it at some point. It's like indoor groups blaming the weather on why they can't beat California groups since they never have snow days. COVID may have impacted cavies but I think show design hurt them more (and I believe staff issues).

If they did something from the anthem days, I’d love it to be “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” which is still my favorite Cavies moment.

Yes.... yes.... YES YES YES YES YES!!!!

So what's wrong with Mars?

Nowadays, he sounds more like, "Phaaaam Reminit."

Nice! And glad that Boerma is back and arranging. Love that they are taking chances with Jazz and overall great music that we wouldn’t expect to hear on the field. Very much looking forward to this! But just one thing…for the love of Seattle, please do not have a patch or someone singing “ Black Hole Sun won’t you come and wash away the rain….”. Same with Rusty Cage, (which should be a phenomenal “in your face” opener). There is one Chris Cornell. And that Chris Cornell is hard to duplicate. Let the horns and percussion be the cover band and maybe some synth for those weird guitar riffs. If Black Hole Sun is the ballad, I’d like to hear something rough. Please no Sarah McLaughlin- esque patches. Beef it up and make it edgy.