Slingerland

Unfortunately, that statement is often not the case. My kids are in a program that's not even a competitive band program, but failing to be at their marching band camp in early August is cause for dismissal from band, which is treated as a class subject in their school. not an extracurricular. None of them are marching drum corps this summer, but if they were, they would have to get a special dispensation in order to miss the band camp, and the director has already told me, in a conversation, that he would not be disposed to see drum corps as a good excuse for missing his camp. He doesn't even treat family vacations as a good excuse for missing camp. And that's with a program where the director and his staff have generally positive feelings about what drum corps can do. If you took an approach that marketed drum corps as "this ain't no marching band" - and followed through by eliminating some of the dorkiest, twee-est things about drum corps now - you might successfully reposition drum corps as something that was more adult and more sellable to the non-band audience. But how do you say "we're not band" without inherently joining in on the stereotype that marching bands are dorky? If you're marketing your product as "we're not that", it's hard to do it without trying to emphasize how superior your product is over the alternative, and those who are responsible for creating the alternative are not likely to enjoy being used as the butt of your campaign. So sure, I'd have no problem pushing drum corps that was harder edged and less dorky than band if that's what it takes to increase the overall audience. But you'd have to do so with your eyes open, that you've essentially put a block there for some of the biggest promoters the activity has now. Alternatively, drum corps could seek to go another route and become much more professional and less traditional in our presentations - go places where the bands haven't yet gone. Start dumping the faux-military uniforms, give more scoring credit based on entertainment value rather than artistic and or technical detail, have judges who really have to be pleased, rather than being seen as "partners in education" the way it's done now. If you want to be "not band" but without specifically saying "we're not dorky", you'll have to put some product out there that sends the message loud enough that the message carries all on its own. But that ain't gonna be cheap, and the same corps at the bottom of the financial pyramid who are crying now will be REALLY sobbing then.

I've had that thought in the past too, and it would be nice, but your gordian knot there is how to extricate drum corps from the perception of it being "marching band" without totally alienating the thousands of band directors out there the corps have been seeking as partners. If you say "drum corps is much cooler than band", then you've basically dissed the band community. If you say "but there's no woodwinds!", you've drawn a distinction without a difference, at least to the majority of audiences who couldn't differentiate between a trumpet and an oboe. It's in uniform, it's on a football fields, they have marching drums, it's a band. I suspect there are some changes that could be made in the products that would read to a general audience, but none of them would be cheap, since they would involve MORE equipment and technology, not less.

Not being political, just historically-minded - the 1970s economy was rotten during Nixon's last year and all of Ford's term too. Remember these? Good point on the draft and 1960s local corps. Obviously not a factor anymore post-1973.

I'd agree with that, except that most of the local corps who died in the 1970s died before they ever had to face any of those issues. There was no expectation in the Badgerland Circuit in the mid 70s that a national tour was necessary (even at the DCI corps level, there were two shorter tours rather than one continuous tour as happens now), and the full size pit was still ten years in the future, so those financial pressures couldn't have been brought to bear (yet). I think you have to focus on the era of greatest attrition among local drum corps, which was the 70s, not the 80s or 90s. The idea of DCI being focused on one big event, with a series of more locally-managed events prior to Nationals, is one I've floated elsewhere here, and it didn't seem to be real popular.

If you have an alternative theory to the one laid out, please bring it to the table. Until you do, the majority here seem to agree that the rise of drum corps-inspired band programs and the fade of the veterans organizations that used to sponsor drum corps are the two most viable villains in the saga of "what happened to those 300 community drum corps?"

Several of us who were there at the time have pointed out the confluence of factors that made small time, community-based drum corps an unfeasible model in an era of shrinking veterans orgs and more plentiful cheap alternatives (aka "band"), and you refuse to accept that those factors are correct. So the way this works in the real world is that you then present an alternative theory. Look at the period from 1974 through 1990, since that encompasses the bulk of the loss of small corps. Consider the number of feature articles in The Instrumentalist about "corps style", the rise of BOA and McCormick's Enterprises, the Hal Leonard "corps style" series of arrangements, and the changes in the way that high school bands viewed drum corps from the 1960s (where it was considered a form of music abuse) through the 1980s (when everyone was copying what was being done at DCI). Have at it.

Most won't make the next move to drum corps for the same reason that those who like doing school plays don't necessarily want to pony up $3,000-5,000 for a summer at Interlochen.Sometimes kids get enough at the high school level that they don't really need or want anything more.The drum corps that succeed in getting those kids who are more serious about marching to show up to their audition camps are the ones who do the best job of giving those kids a product that appeals to them. If you think there was some great conspiracy out there that has killed off the little corps, then please flesh it out for the rest of us. But most of us who marched small corps back in the 70s realized that those corps were getting sqeezed by the combination of low-cost, easy-access band programs and the realization that the kids who did drum corps wanted to be challenged with better programs and better instruction. The grass roots corps were hard-pressed to come up with a response to either challenge.

It's the way it's been since the 70s. This isn't new, and had nothing to do with the G7. Kids in band look at Troopers and Blue Stars and want to march there instead of their local OC corps too.

They're not anymore, and haven't been for 30 years now. The band directors saw that drum corps was cool, and marching band wasn't, and changed their style to match what the corps were doing, complete with mandatory band camps during the same period in August when the drum corps season was wrapping up. Since the style was more or less the same, and the calendar no longer made it possible to do both, and most school bands either have no cost, or negligible costs to the family, there wasn't much of a rationale for community drum corps anymore. Then you add in the rapid decline in veterans org membership, the aging of the baby boomers into adulthood, white flight from working class urban neighborhoods to suburbs (with better band programs), the spike in oil prices in the mid 70s, etc, etc, etc, and history and demographics conspired to make local drum corps a lot less feasible than it was before any of those things occurred. It became a situation where the members themselves decided that if they were going to put the effort into it, they were going to focus on making the cut at the organizations who were doing something bigger and better than their band program could do it, which necessarily put more focus on the corps who already had figured out how to run a national touring program, or on a handful of corps who decided that they wanted to grow into that type of organization.

Not if it's done correctly, and I suspect you'd find a lot more willing minds than you think you would.

Maybe I'm misremembering this, but weren't all the OC corps invited to compete in Prelims last year? I agree that having their Finals 120 miles away is goofy. Wouldn't it make more sense to have their Prelims show also be their "semis" show, with the highest ranking OC corps going on to compete in the Friday Semis day, and the highest score that day determining the class winner?

Rockefeller engaged in practices that were specifically designed to squelch competition and have absolute control over the oil industry, using a series of out and out deceptions in order to achieve his ends. No one in drum corps does anything even remotely similar.

Justice's case against Microsoft was because of the bundling of Internet Explorer in their OS, which gave them a leg up in the browser category. Personally I thought the case was dumb, for the simple reason that there were already superior products out there for anyone who could figure out how to download them, and anyone who continued using IE just because it was bundled got what they deserved. But any drum corps who wants to break away from DCI and form their own thing would presumably be free to do so. DCI is a voluntary association. IF your contention is that somehow the top level corps are to blame for the lower competitive status, smaller memberships, and lower budgets of other organizations who right now have nothing to do with the top level corps on any day to day basis, I don't know what to tell you. That's like saying that Bob's Hardware store, with gross sales of $1m a year, is a victim of Home Depot, just because Home Depot is a bigger brand name. If you sell a better product than me, than I can't really blame you if my customers go your direction.

There's no monopoly in DCI, either within the corps themselves or in the activity as a rule (if someone wants to start up another drum corps association, they would presumably be free to do so). Aside from that.... There are other successful models out there that could be used to build a stronger model for how the activity works. But there are too many people whose noses would be put out of joint if you identified them and their organization as being more developmental than competitive, so no one is willing to go there. Ego is a problem these days, but it's not just the Gibbs and Coates of the world whose egos are the issue.

No promises, just Business 101, friend. When you have a core product that provides most of the income for your business, you don't intentionally underplay that product for fear of taking attention away from other products you want to develop. You promote the hell out of the money maker, because that's where the seed money for new products comes from. DCI isn't able to support the corps they already have at a level commensurate with the amount of money their work brings to the organization. Thinking that somehow they should or can take an already too-small pool and expand it to cover more corps is goofy. Believing that they should just stand in place and not try and grow the business is suicidal. The future for local drum corps is in a farm system and better promotion of the top league, not cutting everyone off at the knees so that those who are currently working with local corps don't feel slighted.

DCI could simply work with the two different groups of corps to create reasonable and sensible associations, and then be just as clear as baseball is about which teams are related to which. Not brain surgery. Right now, OC corps have nothing to pitch their members in terms of further development of their drum corps careers. And there are some who see the migration of the members from OC to WC as being somehow a danger to the survival of the OC, when it COULD be turned into something that's embraced and used to promote the concept of those who get cut from a WC corps taking their talents to the WC's farm team corps for further development. Win/Win.

You can't solve a money problem overall by deciding to neglect the products that make you the most money. Even with WC Finals attendance being weak, from an historic standpoint, they still sell seats at a rate of 15:1 over the Open Class Finals ticket sales, and at a much higher cost per ticket. Clearly the WC corps are who bring in the money right now. So yes, the top ends of the activity need to be more actively promoted to a general audience so that the overall funds available to DCI are increased. Doing so would allow the activity enough money to subsidize the grass roots. But you can't remove the speck from your neighbor's eye when you have a log jammed into your own. Until DCI has enough money coming in to take care of the basic elements of their business, they won't have enough to spend on R & D at the Open Class level.

Ok, Cixy, we get it, everyone involved in World Class corps are evil ########, and everyone involved in Open Class and the lowest ranking WC corps are inherently good people who really love drum corps a lot more than everyone at the top. I find class envy a non-starter as a topic, so the whole "have/have not" thing doesn't do much for me. If those working at the lowest levels really want to be operating at the top of the activity, then they'll do the things necessary to get there. If they're happy running more of a local, grass roots organization, then they'll do that. Makes more sense to me to embrace the world as we find it and look for ways to make it work even better, rather than wanting to throw rocks at those who've decided that being at the top is important to them. As far as a farm system goes, it's something DCI hasn't ever tried before in any explicit fashion - where there is a built-in relationship between WC corps and one or two independent OC or other corps working with them as their minor league team. None of the relationships you cited are in the mold of what I'm proposing. All I'm suggesting is an association between each WC corps and an OC corps or two, not a shared management model, ala Madison and Southwind. Each organization would remain in charge of their own finances, though it would make sense to use economy of scale when it comes to audition camps, etc, etc, etc. For kids who don't make the cut at a WC corps, it would make the option of signing on the line for the OC corps more attractive, as it would get them into the system with the big league corps. If part of the system included an agreement among the WC corps that having marched at their OC corps was an advantage when it came time to audition for WC, you put a carrot on the stick for those 16 or 17 year olds who might otherwise decide to sit it out altogether. Doesn't cost anyone a dime, and it increases the likelihood that you get a few of the current cuts deciding to do drum corps after all.

Totally agree. An audition camp, and a callback camp, and your corps is set. No kid should be in the audition process for more than two camp sessions. I still think you could achieve some of the same goals of encouraging kids to march in Open Class corps if the OC corps had explicit "farm team" relationships with WC corps. The managers in OC would have relationships that went up in the higher ranks of the activity, the WC corps could be helping to train their own recruits (indirectly), and you make marching OC part of the process toward marching WC when you're older. And it would cost everyone involved essentially nothing.

I'd argue that the records prove that changes of management at the field level and in the offices make more of a difference than changes in team personnel. A different manager in the dugout can make the difference between a 1st place team and a 4th place team in the division standings. Ask yourself - have you ever once looked at a show from a corps who is well out of making Finals and thought "gee, you know, if Regiment's members were marching and playing this show, it'd be competing for a Top 3 spot right now." No, me neither. At one point, everyone who is at the top level now was a non-finalist, non-championship drum corps. They all made the decision to do what they had to do to compete at the top levels, and bringing in the right members of the management/design/instructional team to was usually step one. It's not necessarily easy to develop the right design/instructional talent, but it's not necessarily rocket science either. But first you have to want to do it.

There's a lot more movement season to season in baseball than there is in drum corps, and no team owner would allow his team to go for 30 years at the bottom of the standings with the same losing General Manager in charge.

Sounds like old school senior corps. (BTW, I find the "Major League" thing in DCI's marketing to be silly in the extreme. The only thing sillier is the number of visual/guard people who talk about the activity as being part of the world of "pageantry", apparently unaware that "pageantry" is what the people who dress their 7 year-old girls up like 25 year old hookers and have them tap dance in front of judges call their little world too.)

Not sure how old the competitors are, but I doubt any of them are getting paid to compete. http://www.majorleaguebocce.com

True. But no one actually sees community colleges as "similar" to Divison 1 schools. Only here, applied to the different strata of drum corps, do people want to make that leap of logic. The natural progression of the members toward increasingly larger platforms for their competition is something no one's going to stop, and I'm not sure why anyone would WANT it to stop. Makes a helluva lot more sense to me to embrace the reality and try to turn it into a strength, not deny that it exists in the first place, or try to say that if it does, that the fault lies with those who are working at the most competitive levels, rather than with simple human nature.

In the root sense, but not nearly on the same scales as the national touring corps. The needs are on completely different planes from the national touring corps. In an ideal world, the regionals will be so focused on their local competitions that they're not even worried about whatever's going on in the WC world. But corps directors there also have to understand that th nature of their job is that a lot of their members will see their corps as training to succeed at the WC level. Right now, you have a situation in which some people here blame the big corps for 'stealing' members from the Open Class, but they don't really, anymore than college teams 'steal' the best high school players. Kids get older. The ones who are most competitive in nature will find a way to up their game to the next level. It's something to be celebrated, not cursed. And yes, the G7 proposal was d-ckish on this front. But that proposal is dead. So pardon me if I don't worry about it, and consider, instead, ways to fomalize the relationship between Open Class and national touring corps. Wouldn't the overall activity be strengthened if DCI sought to formalize partnerships between smaller corps and bigger corps, the way farm league baseball teams have formal relationships with their major parent clubs? Has there ever been an attempt to do this, or are the egos on every front such that no one wants to admit that they could benefit from such a relationship? In that relationship, the 'farm team' still has a fair amount of independence, but their members understand that there's a path forward that would, if anything, make their association with the Open Class corps an advantage over some kid who had no history with the parent/farm clubs in question. Put a carrot out the the stick and make it explicit, and you give the directors of the OC corps a recruiting tool of their own, AND you throw some water on the embers of discord between the two divisions.