jumpball15

I fear you are correct. The ring leaders are by no means done. Rather they are now in positions to make things even muddier and to once again torment their lowly non-G7 counterparts from within. The foxes are back in the hen house. May the heavens continue to watch over Dan Acheson. We shall continue to need him at the helm of DCI.

Right on!

Stay firm this week, DCI BOD! There may be some changes worth implementing in all of this but do not let the Greedy 7 seize control. If they feel they have to leave, let them go. They'll start picking away at each other, just like they did when they had positions of power within DCI... and they'll want back in. Only BD and SCV have the $$$ to help float the other guys... and Hopkins, among others, really works the float. Stay united!

Round and round we go... Want to cut down on contest expenses and have more money for corps? Trim down judging panels and mean it. Have real faith in the people you accredit to judge and don't double up big captions in big shows. Consolidate captions overall. As you rebalance the sheets to reflect music more realistically, it would be easy to design five judge panels. Talk about savings! Someone mentioned G7 frustration that the other corps aren't "keeping pace." Bless those other corps for doing just that. The changes pushed by the G7 ring leaders have made this activity more and more prohibitively expensive. Here's the baseline question: What's best for the entire drum corps activity?

Unless the G7 does something really outlandish, the 2013 season should come off OK on the field. Behind the scenes? God only knows and He aint saying. 2014 could be very interesting. The G7 have an inflated opinion of their ability to run the show, literally and figuratively. I attended a so-called TOC /G7 or 8 show this past summer. It was irritating at best. You could tell the corps hadn't really committed to doing anything special. (They were too busy practicing so they could beat each other's head in to work on extra stuff.) Some of the "novelty acts" were OK, but nothing more. And the announcers were painful, especially the bubble headed girl wandering the stands. If the G7 wants to offer more of that, they can keep it. IMHO,DCI and its BOD has been very measured and diplomatic in its responses to the G7 threats and puffery. The G7 is still part of DCI after all. Let's hope that diplomatic approach doesn't result in a Neville Chamberlain moment, as long as we're quoting history. Appeasement at all costs won't work with some of these characters either. Some truly ironic side notes: Watch the Brass Roots documentary and hear Cavalier founder Don Warren talk proudly of the founding of DCI and the spirit of cooperation it took to make it work? And where are the Cavaliers today? For shame. Could the same Don Warren have sanctioned their participation in the G7? Carolina Crown came up through the DCI Class A ranks to get to where they are today. Now they want to make it much more difficult for other aspiring corps to do the same thing. "We got to the mountain top. Now we're pulling up the ladder." For shame. DCI helped a cash-strapped Phantom Regiment stay alive with a cash infusion a few years ago. Phantom eventually paid it back and has now added a G7 "thank you." For shame. The Cadets continuously rely on that DCI "cash float." Unless Gibbs and Fieldler ante up that extra bingo money in a big way to help, there could be trouble in YEA land. YEAh, right.

This is all very sad. Drum corps is already such a small activity and getting smaller. A split like this cannot be good. But the current DCI Board can't back down to the G7. The G7 is NOT looking out for the whole activity. These guys are the ones who have made competitive drum corps so expensive. Excessive electronics, giant staffs, mega pre-season camps, some corps directors making six figure salaries... that's how budgets get to the 1.5 - 2 million dollar range. And that's why they constantly need more money. The G7 is still technically part of DCI. We're talking about some of the founding corps. They just have no power on the board after their last stunt. The current board needs to stand firm. If the G7 leaves, DCI can survive. And based on the track records of some of the G7 characters, their house will crumble and they'll come back to DCI. Or maybe they can make their act a stage show and take it to Broadway.

Steve Rondinaro is NOT in the DCI Hall of Fame? Is that possibly true? My uncle started in drum corps after watching that guy announce DCI on PBS in freaking 1980! He was so excited to meet him with the corps. I marched for a couple years with a smaller corps, then I had to quit for work a few years ago. I needed a corps fix and went to the movie theater last August. Rondinaro was still at it. And he's not in the Hall of Fame? How does that happen? .