bartyount

Sky Ryders toured out west when I marched in 91. It was a very fun and memorable tour. It was my first time to ever go to California and I was amazed by how pleasant the weather was. It was a welcome treat after our 2 weeks of everydays in Texas and a week of trekking across west Texas, New Mexico and Arizona in blistering heat.

Ditto this for SCV. I've always been impressed with how much dignity SCV members carry themselves with. Their mere presence commands respect.

Crown is too loud. :)

I'm interested to see the recaps to see if Coats managed to hold on the top brass spot.

Dude - that's totally creepy. BTW - for all you guys referencing Deliverance - the movie was set in Tennessee, not Mississippi!!! :)

Sorry guys. I didn't make the show this year. It's tough to make it due to work when I need all my vacation to go on tour in two weeks to help out with the souvie truck! B)

Ticketmaster blows. I went to a Police concert last month and paid $25 in "convenience" (yah - whatever) / shipping&handling fees... on $50 tickets. That's a 50% markup on the price of the ticket. They are freakin' criminals.

Nice. B) Sky Ryders 91, somewhere in Minnesota after rehearsal, a few of our guard were out in the parking lot practicing and some local punks came up and started harassing them. I'm in the gym and one of our drummers runs in and says "everyone outside, now! And grab a bat!" (there were 15 to 20 baseball bats in the corner of the gym). I don't think I ever saw anything funnier in my 4 years marching than the sight of 100 of us running outside (20 or so with bats raised) and seeing the expressions of disbelief on those punks faces. Priceless. Needless to say, they made a hasty departure without the formalities.

Heh-heh... ok... THAT'S MY HOME, MAN! YOU DON'T DISS A MAN'S HOME! Ok - so it defintely was one of the worst places in Jackson you could be. For those of you that think the Citrus Bowl is bad - Coats housing sight in 93 makes the Citrus Bowl seem like Disney World resorts!

Aww crap! You beat me to it! The first thing I thought of at reading the words "flaming trailer" was that that would be perfect for a VK show! :) Academy - you guys are freakin awesome for stepping up to the plate like that.

If I get in for free and they're unprepared and the show is incomplete, then yes - it's about them. As soon as I pay for a ticket - it's about me. And so what if it's June? Maybe I should walk in and refuse to pay for a ticket. After all - it's just June, right? (Ugh!)

Well - there were other corps that would do the same, but yeah - we were one of them.

Sorry --- to all the corps whose horns we accidentally pegged with jolly ranchers at retreat. There was a guard girl who got a care package like every week, and it always had this super-industrial sized bag of jolly ranchers which we kept at the front of the bus. We would always stuff a bunch in our gauntlets before retreat and share them with the neighboring corps. Cept some corps were too snooty and ignored us (one might say they were more mature, but we thought they were just snobs - haha). So if we were next to a corps who wouldn't play, we would toss the JRs *over* their block (and sometimes over 2 blocks) to the corps that appreciated our generosity. Sometimes, someone would toss one that went astray and it would hit someone or their horn. These people were rarely amused. Now that I look back on it, it was pretty juvenile and it would probably never happen today. But then again - it was fun and it made for some good memories - and that's what really counts (right?). :)

Unfortunately the corps lost this after the 89 season. Not making finals in 89 was a big disappointment to the corps and I think this caused a pretty big loss of vets to other solid top 12 corps. In 90 we only had a small handfull of vets return and because of this, the family atmosphere of the corps members was mostly lost. Since we were mostly rookies, there was little emphasis on history, loyalty or tradition of the corps. Since I was a rookie, I didn't know any better. When I went to Bluecoats in 92, I finally saw what my friends from Sky Ryders (who had marched previous to 90) had meant by the corps being a family. In Coats - and especially that year (92), the corps members had an unusually strong bond. I think this is due alot in part that we had many vets - many of which had marched 6 years or more. Even we rookies were made to immediately feel that we were then part of a long and proud tradition and that we were part of the special Bluecoats family. Still - I made many friends at Sky and I wouldn't trade my time there for anything. But it didn't feel like "home" the way Bluecoats did (and still does).

One of these is wrong cause I know one of the guys in the bari quartet was Steve McCartney. Another guy I know had a "euph solo" - during the scatter part of Strawberry Soup. That was Steve Jones.

Can you expand on that? As a former Sky member, I'm curious about what happened. After marching 90 and 91, I left because the corps basically doubled tour fees for 92 and I couldn't afford it. I was planning on not marching anywhere for the 92 season, but in May of 92, I talked to a friend who had joined Bluecoats and was told they needed to fill a spot. The tour fees were cheap and I dug the Coats, so I went. It wasn't until I went to Coats that season and seeing how well organized it was that I realized just how poorly Sky Ryders had been managed.

Woohoo! My show got a vote! I would have to vote for it myself as well - that makes 2 votes, right?! My second vote would be Sky Ryders 86. I'm not biased or anything.

I hate to be a puddleglum, but there *might* be 1 person in every 100,000 Mythbusters viewers (if that) who care if a G bugle is louder than a Bb (besides - nothin' catchin' fire or blowin' up). Plus it's not a very challenging test to set up. All you need is a way to send air through the horn at constant speed and a sound level meter. Why don't you do the test yourself and post the results here? B)

Concerning smarter vs. harder - when and where I marched (90, 91 Sky Ryders, 92, 93 Bluecoats) the rehersal philosophy defintely emphasized the harder over smarter. And I believe it cost us. There were days people were so tired and burnt out that nobody could focus. You could even tell the staff was feeling the effects (lack of focus, organization, short tempers, etc). But on the days everyone was well rested, you could really see the difference in rehersal. Everyone was very focused, worked hard and we would get tons of cleaning done in a shorter amount of time. If we had had more of these "smart" days, I believe we would have been miles ahead of where ended up.

Ticketmaster is evil. I just paid $25 in extra fees *per ticket* to ticketmaster for tickets to The Police. For the $50 tickets that's a 50% upcharge!!!! Evil.

Hey! Respect, man! That's my home! :)

I've always had a recurring dream since I aged out in 93. It's always pretty much the same - the corps (Bluecoats) calls me up and asks me to fill a hole. So I go and at some point during rehersals I realize I'm nearly 15 years too old to be marching! :) It always ends there - I never make it to a show. :( I used to have these dreams all the time. Now they only occur once or twice during the summer when I'm following the activity closer.

I like it. I know it's heresy, but it's my favorite year for BD.

I read an article on the history of the battle of Thermopylae and saw the History channel documentary the night before I saw the movie and I thought the movie stuck to the major historical points pretty closely. And assuming that the documentary was accurate, even many of the minor details were accurate as well. So unless the history channel and the article I read were inaccurate, to say that almost nothing in the film is historically accuarate is wrong.

90 Sky Ryders - We stopped the show in the middle of our opener because of a sudden thunderstorm w/lightening. After the storm passed we went back out on the field and faced backfield to do a warmup before restarting our show. Sure enough - there was our rainbow - so that's what we played for our backfield warmup. The crowd gave us the biggest applause we got all season for that. Good times - good times... :)