cixelsyd

This requires a more clever name. Try STEDAC.

I see no record of Cavaliers competing in Buffalo in 1999 either. Maybe you are thinking of the year 2000, in which case Cavaliers won a contest in Buffalo on August 6th. But if that is the case, they did not receive any 20s from the judges that day. Visual performance 18.9; GE visual 19.1.

If the judges had any inkling what was coming in the fall, they would have put Cadets 7th (or possibly even 8th).

The Madison Scouts are so old that they forgot they existed prior to 1938. Evidence of their activity in 1920 was just recently brought to light. On the all-age side, the St. Peter Govenaires go back to the late 1920s.

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.

Well, I am quite sure it was not sold illegally. Just to avoid any possible misunderstanding, when I said Blue Devils were "taking over" USBands, I understood that to be a legal, consenting arrangement that was announced publicly... not a hostile takeover.

Any subsequent corps that lawyers can link, or portray as a successor. At this point, you probably cannot bring back Marion Cadets - they had both name and uniform similarities. The whole Erie area is probably banned from starting anything right now, despite having had corps of their own in the past. And forget anything tied to the Bonfiglio family. Surprised they are not dragging Blue Devils into it just for taking over the band circuit.

Apparently, all that matters is whether lawyers will name the new corps as a defendant in a civil suit, rightly or wrongly.

I see no record of 2002 Cavaliers competing in Buffalo.

Actually, it is simple. Simpler than DFTK. Only requires the first two letters.

Following that "logic", we could just throw all victims and reporters out of all corps. Make it an operating policy to do that. Look, no abuse victims in drum corps! I thought the point of the youth activity was to... benefit youth.

And if my 18th birthday is in July, must I transfer from the OC corps to a WC corps that day, and learn a new show mid-season? Or more likely, I simply cannot march either OC or WC that season because no one will have me?

All marchers are taking participant safety training. The goal of that should be to ensure that they all know the full spectrum of options available to them.

SoundSport has no age limit. Some SoundSport teams field "kids", while some others field "adults"... and still others are all-age. Likewise, "alumni" groups are not always exclusively alumni, nor are they always exclusively of a particular age group.

I admire their ambition. But that target date seems overly optimistic.