N.E. Brigand

Reminded of one of my favorite films.

Robert Graves, the novelist and poet (e.g., I, Claudius) who served in the British army in World War I, said that the word, in its adjectival form, was used so frequently in the ranks that the only thing it meant was that a noun was following.

Oh come on. You're gaslighting us. Imagine the NFL telling teams in every game that whichever one spent more with Gatorade in the previous week gets an extra touchdown.

You have to be joking. What Varsity did in some cheerleading contests -- and per that Houston Press article, it appears their founder acknowledged this in court as part of an explanation for why cheerleading shouldn't be considered a sport -- is to award a higher score to teams that bought its products. Imagine DCI telling corps that their scores would go up if they bought a particular company's uniforms, or played a specific company's instruments, or used a certain company's services for transportation.

Huh: "For the high school level, the National Federation of State High School Associations recommends its cheerleading safety rulebook but is not involved with oversight, something it leaves up to individual states and school districts. Lord’s safety organization works with them to write that rulebook, and Varsity is their largest corporate partner. SEC records show Varsity paid the not-for-profit National Federation a total of more than $1.8 million dollars from 2003 to 2007. National Federation officials said they could not reveal specifics of the current contract, which was recently extended through 2021. But Director of Sports and Activities in Spirit Susan Knoblauch said that in return for its financial support, Varsity gets visibility and access to high schools as vendors through meetings and conferences, and direct access to the National Federation’s database of contact information for more than 18,000 schools. The National Federation also allows high schools to participate in Varsity competitions and includes information about them in its rulebook." Emphasis added.

More echoes of drum corps in that Houston Press story: "There is also no required background check during the cheerleading association’s certification process. Despite court records and local news reports documenting more than a dozen cases of cheerleading coaches convicted of sexual abuse across the country since 2008, Varsity and the American Association of Cheerleading Coaches do not ban coaches for criminal misconduct or publish a list of coaches who are banned from the sport, unlike other national sports governing bodies such as U.S.A. Gymnastics. If such a list existed for cheerleading, Rick DeSpain would be on it. DeSpain is a registered sex offender who owns an elite competitive cheerleading gym in Virginia. In 2008, DeSpain was convicted of sexual battery and assault after three girls he coached at the Virginia Wild gym came forward with allegations of inappropriate touching. According to the Virginia Wild website, DeSpain, who renewed his status as a sex offender in January, is still the gym’s owner, and is a certified coach through the U.S. All Star Federation, another nonprofit funded by Varsity that is the main governing body for competitive cheerleading among all-star gyms. Meanwhile, Varsity-run competitions continue to extend invitations to Virginia Wild teams."

From the same piece: "Webb was not made available for comment, but Varsity’s public relations director, Sheila Noone, responded to the Houston Press. 'The legal definition of whether cheerleading is a sport in U.S. schools is up to the Department of Justice, but Varsity believes that cheerleading is more than a sport,' Noone wrote in an email. Webb’s 2010 testimony, however, implies that Varsity actually views cheerleading as less than a sport. He testified that Varsity’s competitions were established only for 'promotion of his cheerleading supply business.' In one competition, Webb admitted, teams received more points if they used more Varsity merchandise as props."

Ah, well, I stand corrected! Thanks. I'd never heard of them before this discussion, and the only link I've seen here offering any hisory of the company implies they moved into cheering after that sport was well established ("In 2004, Varsity bought the National Cheerleaders Association"). But digging into some of the links in that piece, I see that the company's founder, Jeff Webb, who had cheered in college, worked for the the NCA apparently beginning in the late 1960s and then started his own rival league in 1974, which bcame Varsity. And Varsity bought in 2004 was the NCA's "parent company, National Spirit Group." Now I'm trying to imagine a world in which DCI or Music for All are owned by for-profit companies. - - - - - - - - - - On another note, this passage from that Houston Press story amusingly echoes some discussions we've had about drum corps: "In 2010, Webb was called to Connecticut to testify as an expert witness during Biediger v. Quinnipiac University, a landmark court case in the debate over whether cheerleading is a sport. He testified, definitively, that it is not a sport, which is exactly what the court ruled in the end. That may be surprising to the hundreds of thousands of registered athletes participating in Varsity’s competitions, some of which are televised on CBS Sports Network and ESPN."

On my best days I was last chair.

When they started, did they know cheering?

I've had a notion that one reason Hopkins was able to get away with this for so long was that, intentionally or not, he made himself into such a controversial figure, someone who was the subject of so many (non-criminal) complaints in the drum corps community, that he was protected, as it were, by the appearance of having enemies who were just out to get him.

Just saw reference today to a recent case where prosecutors and a defendant (a police officer who lied under oath, which led to a man being convicted and serving 10 years for a crime he didn't commit) agreed to a deal which ought to have had no jail time, but the judge rejected the deal, saying the sentence had to include imprisonment. Not sure what state it was.

Wow. For those, like me, who can't the image without opening a new tab: "08/28/20 [...] Scheduling Order - Guilty Plea 9/24/2020"

Thanks for your work. I love the DCW reports! And I'm not really expecting them to do controverisal work. (I also have the two history of drum corps books, to which you contributed a chapter. But your picture there gave no hint as to how tall you were, which surprised me when we met.) And everything you're saying about not everyone in even "hard hitting" writers like Tricia Nadolny, not to mention what Tim points out, ties right back to my off-topic post: the biggest single problem with journalism is that there isn't nearly enough of it.

Oh, to be sure, and they better be careful about dealing with Varsity.

Thanks. Again, they're great at what they do! And I very much appreciate them for it.

A majority of the 20,000 probably do have marching bands, though, who generally have no interest in competing. So the DCI-Varsity plan seems to be to interest some portion of those groups into doing something additional on top of their regular marching band activity. I've been tough on this concept because, per the links others have provided, Varsity seems like a pretty bad company. But here's a possible upside: DCI hopes to use Varsity as a way of increasing awareness of the activity in those 20,000 schools, which could lead to more people trying out for drum corps in the summer. In a thread I posted seven or eight years years ago, I complained that in the program book for OMEA state finals, in which some 12,000 kids participate, there were lots of ads for college music programs but not one from any drum corps (not even the Bluecoats) or from DCI. I suggested that was a missed opportunity, so I suppose I should be glad that DCI may have found a way to reach a lot more band students. But I'm still suspicious of Varsity.

I was under the impression that Bands of America was formed at least in part thanks to a uniform company. Does anybody know if that's true?

I find the reporting on the Mandarins thus far to be unsatisfactory, yes. There are basic facts we don't know, and others we only know because of social media posts or from statements by the corps. And in general, drum corps reporting is terrible. I don't mean that as disparagement of the work of any of the part-time or amateur journalists who work for Drum Corps World. I mean that, as I described generally, there's far too little of it. If a high school sports team fired an assistant coach following allegations of mistreatment, or let go another coach with a terse, foreboding statement, the local paper would cover it. Or at least that's how things used to be. The Mandarins have many more players than your average high school sports team. (Not sure about the 2018 date you reference.)

Right, but to go back to what garfield started with, this is what the members negotiated for: "With the green light, we got to work, crafting new structures and implementing changes. We secured an extra half hour for dinner and an extra hour of free time at the end of the day, each day. We secured more free days. We received time every day in the first week for cultural development. We completely revamped our tour job system by mixing the composition of teams. We made a website of every member’s picture and information and gave everyone access to learn about each other. We built a culture of inclusivity, wholesomeness, and care for each other." Setting aside the headline reference to unions, which gets people's attention but doesn't actually control in this situation, should there be a mechanism at all corps by which members can have input on potential changes like these?

It's true that any good thing, like a union, can be abused. (And in what fantasy world were government officials not taking bribes, ahem, campaign donations from the bosses who employ the unions' members in hopes of, say, taking the members' unionization rights away from them?) But as others have pointed out, most corps members aren't paid, and in general are unlikely ever to be paid, and thus the kind of potential abuse you describe is presumably impossible. That said, where this conversation might be most useful, and where garfield seemed to start it, is in asking what sorts of useful things unions do for their members, and asking whether DCI members are in need of those useful things, and if so, without a union, how they might be provided.

Asking for a friend: if someone only makes one comment on an off-topic point but he uses 1,200 words in that one comment, is it still brief?

This strikes a chord for me. Just this week I took part in an installment of an ongoing Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion discussion among the leadership team of the non-profit performing arts company where I work. One concern that has been raised in previous EDI discussions was the transparency of our decision-making process, at all levels, and in the course of considering that subject, we moved into a conversation about how artistic and financial decision are made. A few years ago, as part of an effort to respond to a long-term structural deficit, we cut our overall expenses by a lot compared to what we'd spend in previous seasons. Subsequently, board members told our executive directors how impressed they were that those cuts weren't evident in our artistic product, which looked as impressive as ever. But if you peered behind the scenes, you might find exhausted staff scraping by on very little pay, who stick around because they believe in the mission, even to the detriment of their well-being and personal finances. (And that further ties back to EDI concerns: for various historical and systemic reasons, people of color are likelier to come from poorer backgrounds, with fewer savings to lean on, and thus, no matter how much they wanted to sacrifice for an organization's mission, they would be less able to do so.) So in this discussion we asked ourselves a question: Historically, we start our annual planning process by identifying the artistic work we'd like to bring to our community, and then we consider what it would cost to produce that work, and whether or not we can afford it, and then if we really think the project is important but it's too expensive, we look for what we can cut: how short a period can we employ the already underpaid staff, for instance. But what if instead we assumed a different starting point? What if we never planned a season where anyone in these positions was employed for fewer than, say 32 weeks, and every person made a reasonable wage? And only then did we choose the productions, still selected as those that would best serve the community, but with this new constraint. There would be trade-offs, to be sure. For example, the physical aspects of the work might not be as good: those board members I mentioned probably wouldn't be able to say they couldn't see the cuts. Maybe the audience would too. Would they be less likely to support work they deemed inferior? Is there a way to bring them along on this journey with us? Surely there a parts of that conversation like that applies to drum corps. And there also are aspects of treating people right beyond finances and workload. Turning to one recent point of controversy in this field: did Mandarins, for instance, prioritize competitive success above members' well being and therefore give less credence to complaints about abusive behavior? If so, did they do so in response to fears that their long term survival depended on scoring better? Turning to a more general point of concern in drum corps: is there money being spent on equipment, props, costumes, even instrumentation that would better be spent on staff or member well-being? I do know that some of that is purchased via arrangements that pay off financially for the corps, but is that true of all corps, or only the best corps? Do judges reward corps for spending more money? Does that perpetuate a system where the corps who are already financially successful can afford to treat people right and those who are struggling cannot? No easy answers here, I'm sure. But to bring this back full circle to the subject of transparency: DCI's leadership cannot be so ignorant as to have been completely unaware of the concerns about Varsity that others have raised here. Should DCI explain how they decided that those concerns were either overblown or worth the risk in getting involved with this company?

Also, it's not exactly an easy thing to fact check one of the world's most powerful companies about the data they control.

Don't confuse journalists with publishers.