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I was at the St Louis stadium the last time they held a show there. It was run down and poorly maintained.

[laughs] Pink is a solo act, not a band. She could sell that dome 100 times over what DCI could put in it.

Purdue in West Lafayette is a lot easier to get to as it is off I-65. But I am a Purdue grad so perhaps I am biased. If LOS isn’t ready, unless DCI can quickly swing a deal with Detroit or St Louis, it would mean that DCI championships will be outside. As God intended.

The positive about the new turf installation in LOS should be no weather delays. Here's hoping everything goes well & as planned. I guess we could all go to Military Park for a stand still. 🤷‍♂️🧐

For years people have been saying corps need to get in bed with corporations to stay afloat. So DCI goes and does that, but now we have to be overly picky about what, who, how, when? Without being able to see the agreement we can’t know exactly how much benefit there is for the activity, but if we want this activity to survive, thrive, and provide more safety and this agreement does provide a net benefit, I’m all for it.

Just to clarify…I love Toms work and will miss him. I think DCI will miss him. I just hope the ones from his crew who are staying on keep up the tradition of producing a quality finals week for the broadcasts, audio and video, etc. I purchased the bundle download again this year and love the sound of the AIFF files on my system at home and in the car. I do recall Phantom being extra loud this year when I saw them live, so maybe the audio doesn’t reproduce that power that they had this past summer. I still love the recordings though. 🙂

Scott is an outstanding musician, arranger, and teacher. He's earned this honor.

Deaf or hard of hearing is still the preferred term by most of us, particularly those who sign. Hearing impaired measures one by one's deficit after all. Even in the best of conditions, the best lip readers get about 25%-30% by lip reading and the rest by context or a lucky guess.

One of our former lab managers is completely hearing impaired; he graduated HS in early 1960s. He can read lips; says that back then they weren’t allowed to use sign language. But it has to be a one-on-one conversation. Hard to follow a group conversation.

Like I said in an earlier post, reliance vs opportunity. This provides the opportunity to subsidize current in place practices and medical staff.

The BAC corps doctor seems to be able to write scripts wherever they travel, but I have no idea how that all works. She is with them from the beginning of spring training til finals, but I think she gets a week off at some point, just like the rest of the staff.

Ex-friend (walked out on wife hence the “ex”) went there. Story of their football team decades ago. Beat a high ranked team that got over confident. Other team players were saying out loud what they were going to do because “they can’t hear us”. No.. but they can read your lips. 🤦‍♂️

The next thing, air conditioned shakos for DCI; wait... 😂

Cool, you can call an audible (Ok Dr Philosophy - is it an audible if you can’t hear it? This is a variation of the tree falling in forest question). LSU, on the other hand, developed air conditioned helmets (not making this up)

Yup. Although they've got some new tech helmets to play with these days.

For what it’s worth, ethics & standards is squarely in his IRL wheelhouse.

I loved it there. I kept my hotel in Indy, too. Just hedging my bets.

Worth doing regardless. Bloomington's a wonderful town 🙂

[reads list] [realizes each and every one of those probably happens to every corps, every year, every tour...to multiple marching members]

The neighbors in Trinidad would be "WHAT IS THIS LOUDNESS? YOU'RE A DEAF SCHOOL."

That'd be fun but, we don't have the stands. We'd be a pretty cool housing site tho.

It would be cool if they could move it to SeaGull Stadiumin Salisbury only a little more than an hour from Annapolis and easy access to Philly from there. I am not sure if the stadium is big enough as it was designed primarily for lacrosse I donated a lot of money (for me ) to building this, so I have to promote it every chance I get.

The partnership is for "24/7 TELEHEATH" services, not in-person. Most likely DCI used their bargaining power of ALL the corps to get a substantially discounted rate on this service. This works great for corps because often urgent cares are closed/not close by/take the ONE vehicle some corps have that's needed to do airport/food runs etc. Now corps can get diagnosis/prescriptions written on the bus, or at the housing site. That's a huge game changer.

I think I've stayed in what was equivalent to a barn on tour. Some barns are actually nicer. 😁

I think your complaints more come from reliance versus opportunity. Would it be smart to rely on this arrangement? Not at all. But to subsidize established practices and utilize where appropriate and feasible? Great arrangement.

Jon Vanderkolff Scott Boerma Gordon Henderson And one of our own, Michael Duffy aka @McDuffy https://www.dci.org/news/four-to-be-inducted-into-dci-hall-of-fame-class-of-2024

Ironlips, I was blown away by compositional artistry of this arrangement. Much ahead of his time.

"Mc Duffy"...what a piece of work! In a time when bugles had only one valve, there was no pit, nobody read music, and drum lines played rudiments (whether they complemented the brass charts or not), Mike took the rest of us to school, creating arrangements that sang. Whether for Anaheim, Blue Stars, Kilts, Troopers, Garfield or any of a dozen more iconic units, his work was "the sound of DCI" and we all knew it. And never mind all the "should have happened a long time ago" stuff. Those in the know have acknowledged for years that he was a master, and now it's time to celebrate his "official" recognition by his peers (as if he actually has any).

It wasn't just the tic that changed....it was also judged timing. Starting in 1984, shows were judged in their entirety....no more saving the riskiest stuff for after the 11:30 mark. No more dropping a rifle and not having it affect the score (80 BD). No more ensemble tear of the gods not affecting the score (82 SCV) Now judging from beginning to end. This also led to the end of every corps repeating large chunks of the prior year (much easier to clean when you already knew it)...83 BD was 3/5th of the 82 show....and the repeated charts were in the same places. 84 was the first year BD did not repeat at least one chart from the prior year (not counting the NY Fantasy tag ending). By 88 -- I think -- you rarely saw corps repeating charts in successive years as a matter of course.

Surprised no one has waded in to address the specific questions. Yes. It started with the brass caption in 1982 and 1983, then percussion and visual followed in 1984. I would expect a range of opinions on this... but to compile all that I have heard from testimony of the people involved, there were frustrations with the various limitations imposed on caption judges that pre-dated the innovations to which you refer. For instance, prior to the 1970s, the captions for bugles, drums and M&M were judged entirely in teardown mode. Caption judges assessed "execution", looking for errors and almost entirely limited to deducting the same fraction of a point for each error. There was little they could do to address the three qualitative aspects of errors - tolerance (the dividing line between error and successful execution), severity (how bad/obvious is the error), and duration (how long does the error persist, and how do performers recover). Execution judges also could not consider the difficulty of what was being performed - only whether they perceived errors. Results from one show to another could vary quite a bit from individual judges having different levels of tolerance to error. Several changes were made during the 1970s to start addressing these concerns, but they primarily added "analysis", more judges to give credit for what was being performed. Percussion also had a "degree of excellence" subcaption at one point. But "execution" judging still had the same limitations. The change from teardown to buildup enabled the "execution" judge to become a "performance" judge, free to make and quantify all the subjective assessments alluded to above. All that said, I think there was another change that was at least equally important. Prior to the 1970s, there was very little communication from judges to corps staffs. This underwent a massive transformation, with post-show critiques and recorded commentary becoming standard practice by the 1980s. I prefer to call it "free-form" drill, as asymmetry was not a new thing at all. Drills were only symmetric for a brief period in the 1970s. Prior to that, the rules required you to start on one goal line and finish on the other.

my HS was mostly not competitive during my years, but i remember in the summer of 86 being taught how to do a dot book, with drill written by a guy who was in the corps i marched in, and actually marched with. he just hated whenever we said the number 27

How did it take until AD 2024 for Scott Boerma to be inducted?

Finally, a positive Cadets thread - one that is highlighting and honoring the legendary stamp they've left in the activity. The other Cadets thread is a super buzzkill 😡 I didn't start in the activity until I was 15 and I would have never made the cut for Cadets 1994 guard but that's the show that showed me just how clean a guard could be. 1996 was another WOW factor when it came to the guard so I made the jump in 97 - my years with the Cadets were AMAZING! It was hard - they pushed us HARD back then but it shaped the person I became. 1996 Cadets just had it all for me and will forever be my favorite show, even more so than winning in 1998.

At this point, it's probably more likely that those shows will just stay cancelled. Going to be really hard to find a new venue on such short notice.