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Light years? How many? And how many points is a light year worth? Are the california corps really so much To Infinity And Beyond that no mere mortals like the Cadets guard could compete? Not too much objectivity here. Can we all stop with the honking and cite specific examples of difficulty playing/marching, or segments of dance/spinning, if we're claiming our own personal corps is, like, totally waaay better. Unsubstantiated claims are for high school. Thanks, Cadets people, for posting video links. Seeing the Vic Firth videos of Cadets drumline Applachian Spring segment has opened my eyes, and includes the score. That's evidence. I also see on the Akron video that they're playing that during an extremely difficult faded transition while the rest of the corps is finishing the ballad at a completely different tempo, and while they're trucking across the field diagonally at 192 bpm. And it's beautifully musical. Yikes! The last time the Cadets drumline was playing such stunning (but a lot easier) music, and so musically, they were playing Thom Hannum's arrangement, and they were awarded with a perfect percussion score. What playing/marching by another drumline is harder than what we see in the Vic Firth vid and at Akron? Video? Drum score? Coats honks here keep making claims that their book and drill is harder. Prove it. Let's stay objective, stop making unsubstantiated claims, and cut it with the honking or bleating.

Anyone have recent lot videos of both drumlines from Coats and Cadets running the show? It'd be interesting to compare.

Body movement in general is not as hard as running backwards diagonally across the field and playing difficult horn passages, or the like, which has been the Cadets' staple for a few decades. Other corps have done a lot of running, but little simultaneous playing while running (Cavies perfected this in the early 2000s). Rolling around on the turf or pretending that marching members are in the guard when they're not playing just looks like a bad high school band to me. We had to do that in high school. The band would do stupid dance moves during drum features. "Body movement" is in this same, awful, tradition, and it's almost never very demanding, but it's almost always overused these days, and most always worse than narration or thunderous goo ever could be. But back to the point: what must the Cadets add to fully realize the potential of this show and what seems to be the unmatched talent across all sections they have this year (if scores indicate anything)?

I remember reading a lot of hand-wringing from Devils fans a few years ago, worrying throughout July that team blue lacked the demand to win the championship up against Cadets and others that year. BD went ahead and won anyway, and these boards were full of vitriol debating all the park-and-blow, the low bpm walking vs fast marching, etc. What is the Cadets show lacking? Why do so many think they will peak too early and get passed by BD, Coats, or Crown? Why do so many think that they "need to add a lot to win", as George Dixon said? You never want to see a Cadets drumline getting punked because they lack demand, but against Bluecoats (I'm a big fan of the Coats, btw), it seems their book isn't hard enough. The Cadets have had the best drumlines on average for the last decade plus, and that's been because they fly across the field and because no one has a harder book, ever. It seems the Cadets are doing something of what the Blue Devils have been doing for a decade - lowering the bar and going for clean, clean, clean. To me, that's not the Cadets. I'd like to see them push the envelope every year. I'd like to see them innovate. (But by "innovate" I don't mean the BOA "body movement" drek.) Besides the discussions about how to treat the narrator, what would you like to see the Cadets staff add? More difficult percussion book? Drill? Brass book? What specifically is lacking in demand? If you were on the Cadets creative team, what weakness do you see, and what additions/changes do you recommend?

I'd be extremely surprised if the Cadets are now somehow, in your blue-eyed version of things, a feeder corps for the Bluecoats. If anything, it's been the other way around for decades. For good reason. Many Cadets members are multi-year vets from other corps, quite often top-12, who want to finish their career with a medal. Yes, members move around, but the problem is lack of resources and consolidation. When I marched, summer cost me $2500 cash. But that was only a small part of it. I turned down an internship at Arthur Andersen which would have paid $6000+. Opportunity cost is $10-15k if you can line up a good internship. And that's not including lost weekends of work over winter, travel, etc. With that kind of investment, no wonder kids will go where they think they can win, if anything, to get their money's worth. And all those years of training and practice and lessons in what - at least in life - is a useless skill, like spinning for sure, or maybe drumming (unless you have a band), and even playing trumpet. Let's face it - not too many gigs out there for rifles and flags unless you teach HS flag corps, which can only be a part-time or volunteer position anyway. So there's not a little amount of desperation involved too - last fling in a young person's life before reality hits. Hard.

What I'm arguing is pretty simple - members move around, are recruited, chase incentives or anniversaries or attractive staffs or programs. I'm not saying that the Bluecoats caused Glassmen to collapse. I'm saying that Bloo benefited from it. Just like Cadets certainly did as 27th and Bridgemen were collapsing, exactly when Cadets moved to the top of the ladder through the 80s. Lots of evidence for this out there - when's the last time Phantom and Cavies were both top 5? When the Cavies were at the top, Phantom was consistently second tier in the top 12. Cavies decline, Phantom rises, and vice versa for the most part. And while we don't have the data, I'd bet my home that most members of any given corps are from that region. So more corps in a particular region make it harder to compete for members and resources. And the number of top-tier MM's these days is undoubtedly fewer. Of course you've not heard of corps having a hard time finding members. Corps keep folding year after year. Glassmen, Kiwanis, Orlando, etc. in recent years. How many fewer corps do we have now than in the 70s? We've probably lost two-thirds of our corps. Probably an even higher percentage. We used to have quarterfinals, cutting to a top 25. We're down to 23.

Bluecoats drumline is "largely" from California? At most that would mean six guys. We have another 110+ to talk about here, and I'd venture to say most are from Ohio or driving distance away. Drum corps is still very much regional. Most members are driving to auditions and rehearsals. How many Crown members are from the NYC/Boston area? Or Cadets members from South Carolina or Florida? Blue Devils members from Illinois? C'mon, let's not distort reality. Regarding the 'coats - If you have two top-12 corps in the same northern half of the same state, it divides the talent. It also divides financial support, staff, etc. etc., in an era of diminishing resources and increasing expenses. Look, don't take my word for it. Look at the finals performances. Glassmen were top 5 in the late 90s early 2000's and Bluecoats were barely breaking top 12. (The year of Glassmen's highest finish - 5th in 1999 - the Bluecoats didn't even make finals. Not a random coincidence. Coats were 10th in 98 too, when Glassmen also finished 5th, and Coats were 12th in 2000) Then Glassmen decline through the 2000s, and in the last few years, precipitously (out of the top 12), and Bluecoats rise. Recruiting happens. Madison 1988 is the most glaring example. And Bridgmen/27th Lancers collapse coinciding with Cadets' rise is incontrovertible. The talent base is decreasing. Kids are busier and focusing on other things. That's why DCI (read: corps staff, members, alumni) should do MUCH more educating and less obsession with competition, which drives consolidation, elitism, and a shrinking of the activity and its audience. Heck, almost all we talk about around here is competition, judging, etc., while the activity itself declines. At the rate we're heading, in 10 or 15 years, there will only be 12 or fewer world class corps, so we can eliminate semi-finals altogether. Education should be everyone's focus.

Let's talk "recruiting" and whether this is helping or hurting the activity. Consider some history first: How much do you think that the story of the ascendency of the Garfield Cadets, and more recently, the Bluecoats and Crown, have to do with the bankruptcy of nearby corps? I remember hearing that the Bayonne Bridgemen, who had one of the best drumlines in history in 1982, nearly collapsed before the 1983 season, and members of the drumline and hornline joined Garfield. Just as the Cadets began their three-year championship run, the Bridgemen were in collapse, a process that took from 1982-86, when they finally ceased operations. The Crossmen also took a huge drop from 8th to 13th from 82 to 83, and I've heard that they lost a number of top members to the Cadets. De facto recruitment had to have happened there too. (I mean, didn't the Cadets 'recruit' their young corps director from the Crossmen?) Notice how the Glassmen folding has hugely benefited the Bluecoats? Orlando Magic's collapse and Spirit's decline in the 2000s (finishing 15th, 16th, 17th in 08, 09, and 10) directly coincided with the rise of Crown. I'm not directly arguing that corps are predatory, but there are very few truly talented people out there who can spin, drum, and march at the highest level. Someone's or something's convincing top members to switch - staff, hype, better show design, musical program choice. Geography helps, but what helps most is that if corps in a particular area have collapsed, leaving one or two standing. Crown's rise has a lot to do with the fact that they are one of only two world class corps in all of the south, a region of 85 million. Consider this: one comparatively tiny geographical area in the midwest (talking a 120 mile radius) has the Cavies, Phantom, Blue Stars, Colts, and Madison. The population in that area is about 13 million, one-sixth of the southern recruitment area of Crown and Spirit. The entire midwest's population, by the way, is 55 million. It's almost unheard of that Phantom has an amazing year when the Cavaliers or Madison do the same. Recruiting waves explain a lot of it. Best clear example of recruiting I can think of: I had a friend who marched Madison in 1988 for his age-out year (had marched Cadets in '87), and he told me that they had a huge influx of talent that year because they announced early that they were going on a European tour. Voila! Ce n'est pas une coincidence. That's their only championship year. Giving incentives to join - like a month-long European trip - certainly is recruitment. There is very little written about this on the forum, if anything. Does this hurt or help the activity? I'm thinking it hurts - hard for corps to stabilize membership, and further consolidation puts corps out of reach of many, whose parents don't necessarily want their kids to commute 500 or 1000 miles to rehearse through the winter and early spring. This activity has become very elite, and very elitist. Too many corps have folded to make DCI accessible and influential. Heck, I wouldn't ever have known about it had it not been for PBS in the 80s, back when there was at least one drum corps within 200 miles of 90% of the US population. No more. While the level of performance has risen, as you'd expect with consolidation of talent in the hands of very few corps, DCI's real impact on the country has dramatically declined. DCI's main fundraising effort should be focused on generating the cash necessary to have finals broadcast on every PBS station nationally every year. DCI in theaters, where you're preaching to the choir, is nothing, nothing at all, like national TV. It's less about music education and more about competition for smaller and smaller crowds at fewer events (and no national audience on TV anymore, which is a tragedy.) Corps have a disincentive to help a friend in need. They'd rather take the talent of the collapsing corps and raise their score next year. Yes, corps do a few one-off clinics, but not nearly enough of them, and those clinics are as much about recruitment as they are about education. So, in reality, because everyone's so obsessed with competition, and because competition requires aggressive recruitment, growth becomes predatory. On the entire activity. Which means "growth" isn't growth at all, just consolidation and elitism, which results in evaporation of audiences and the disappearance of any truly national media. We've consolidated and recruited ourselves into a nearly irrelevant ghetto.