MikeN

My HS BD was (and still is) married to a contra from the '86 line. I may have pestered them with fanboy questions for years afterwards... Mike

Honestly, I'd be surprised if it was. Phantom's mileage may vary, but in general, drum corps design staffs get together either during football season or right after. Keep lobbying them in the meantime! 🙂 Mike

On the high end, ours cost $130 for digitally printed tops and pants, and we passed the cost on to the members, who got to keep the uniforms. *No net cost to the corps at all.* On the low end, one year we did just digital tops, while using basic black bibbers. Cost the kids $70. This was back at the beginning of the digital revolution, and our deal got better every year we kept using them. Mike

No worries - here's the link: https://www.reddit.com/r/drumcorps/comments/w40a9w/brass_playing_time_2022_and_other_past_shows/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf TL;DR version: this poster stopwatched the shows in 2022, with the rule that 4 brass had to be playing for it to count - solos or duets don't count Blue Devils - 5:57 Bluecoats - 7:25 Boston Crusaders - 5:48 Carolina Crown - 5:53 Santa Clara Vanguard - 5:40 Cadets - 6:30 Blue Stars -7:22 Phantom Regiment - 7:10 Cavaliers - 6:07 Mandarins - 5:38 For reference: 1984 Cadets - 9:45 1989 SCV - 9:08 1993 Cadets - 9:42 2005 Cadets - 8:05 2008 Phantom - 7:25 2011 Cadets - 7:38 2014 Blue Devils - 7:36 2016 Bluecoats - 6:37 2019 Blue Devils - 4:45 Mike

Based on the timings posted on Reddit, I'm going to have to disagree with you on that one. 😞 Mike

I do have a little experience here. I was part of a team that was 99% of the way along when COVID hit and ended those plans. These days, the easiest way to start is via SoundSport. It's literally structured to help these small businesses along, develop them, and see which can turn into an Open Class corps down the road. You definitely don't have to be a millionaire, but you *have* to have a realistic business plan. Our first year tour was literally going to be one week, day trips only so no housing needed. You also have to have a coherent mission/elevator pitch, and "DCI is Cool" isn't it. What service/mission are you providing? You absolutely can keep costs down in a hundred different ways, but only if everyone buys in to the mission itself. Mike

Corps do have to be nonprofits, which means they are tax-exempt, and (in general terms) the tradeoff is that legally any profits made have to go back into the organization, and not paid out to shareholders etc. (Drum corps generally don't have much in the way of profits anyways, so it's normally not an issue.) Anyways, to answer your question, nonprofits still can be run like for-profit corporations, and all of the big ones tend to be. In drum corps, many/most of them now have a Board of Directors (required) who hires a CEO/Executive Director to run the overarching organization, to each performing group under them (DCI, WGI, youth symphony, what have you) having their own director that reports to the CEO/ED. So in Phantom's case, the Corps Director only has to worry about running Phantom Regiment and not all of the other things that the actual nonprofit corporation does. Mike

Dan is a great ambassador for DCI. You have only to spend a few seconds with him to see how much he cares about drum corps. Seriously - I've had several opportunities to interact with him in various capacities, and he's always impressed. I have my own opinions about needing more separation between the event promotion / coordination arm from the sanctioning body arm, as DCI is a weird Frankenstein one-size-fits-all organization, but that's for another day. Mike

Oh man, I hope not. I was a season ticket holder for the Texans for years at NRG, which is the sister facility; very similar design. For one season opener vs Pittsburgh, they had the roof open and the sun was like a magnifying glass on our side of the field - people literally passed out. I don't think they've opened the roof since for a day game. Mike

There are like three words in that #4 that I don't even think drummers can *spell.* Mike (drummer)

Forgive me, as this is a years old story, but I once had a chance during Finals week to pick the brain of the analytics company DCI used. One of the tidbits they told me at the time was the corps with the highest average age won every single year they'd tracked it. I'm sure it's probably varied a bit since then, but it's still food for thought/discussion. Mike

Guardians, but I knew what you meant. 🙂 I'm glad they came back to it after the veer towards BD Lite in 2019. (Unpeeled wasn't a bad show at all, and will always be near and dear to my heart, but Guardians built their modern DNA on *this* stuff.) Mike

I disagree so hard with this. Mike

The last year my kiddo was in HS band he was one of 11 tubas. We loved seeing the faces on the other bands with 3-4 as we lined up, and lined up, and lined up... Mike

Went to a football game the first time I visited USNA - coldest football game I've ever attended in my life. Mike

You're definitely right - and I'm sorry, I'm not meaning to sound like I'm picking on you - but you brought up a good point. Achievement *should* be able to outpace content if needed. That's the whole point of the subcaption. If a great brass line plays a watered down book, they should get high achievement, low content. I don't get how these are always supposed to tie together. Grrr. Same with GE - should be <mostly> separate from performance scores. As an example, Troopers should probably be blowing the roof off of the competition in GE, even if their performance captions aren't keeping up as hard. More Grrr. Mike

Yeah - the semis version is far better. Still my favorite show though - they just channel the old school dinner club jazz orchestra vibe so well that year. -Mike

Very true, but I'd posit that the technical proficiency of the battery is still easier to determine than the "emotional clarity" of the program. Mike

The Frack. Mike

In '18 they decided to have a DM only at OC Finals retreat due to weather. Sucked, cause the stands were pretty full and I don't know if we'd been a full retreat all season. Our program coordinator says to me with a wink and a nod "follow me and act like you belong" and just strolled right in all casual-like. So we saunter on to the sideline so we can see the results. (And my kid was one of the DM's and I wanted photos.) What I didn't realize is that while we were talking about this, our corps had lined up behind us. So while we're trying to ninja our way to the sideline, we were trailing 100+ kids in a giant line. Subtle... To their credit, DCI let everyone sit on the sideline against the wall, and the kids did a great job in raising the roof for all of the score announcements. Definitely made it a party! Mike

Oh boy do I have opinions on GE, and little of it good. 🤬 Mike

Congrats Guardians! First top-6 finish at Nats ever. Achievement unlocked! Mike

In my time in OC, food was one of the bigger budget items. We didn't really get too much into the X per member per day, as we had a pretty good master formula (and a long time food director who knew her stuff). That said, I definitely think we fed the kids well, but we got to go see Boston's food spread once and it just blew ours away. It was pretty amazing. Mike

Can't argue with that part - the stadium/corps part of it was very nice. Since they had downtown blocked off, the flow through warmups, performance and pack was pretty logical. No space for trucks, which did suck. (I'm also biased due to the Monsoon of 2018. Never stood up to my knees in water in a parking lot before.) Mike

Back in the beginning <checks notes oh my god it was twenty years ago?!?> we were guessing when we structured the forums that D2/3 threads would get buried in the D1 forums. Honestly, hindsight has shown that combining them these days wouldn't be an issue anymore. (Note: I have no power to actually *do* this... 🙂 ) Mike