Wildwood Predictions

[VOReason]

Getting back to Wildwood ,my guess would be for someone to even come close in score to the Buc's they would have to be 5 points better then them .DCA isn't going to let the Bucs loss till someone that much better comes along .As for scores tomorrow night .here's my quess GOOD LUCK TO ALL CORPS IN THE 2014 SEASON

BUCS 82,5

Cabs 78,3

Fusion 73.4

Windsor 61,2

I would tend to disagree. It is not in any circuits best interest to have one corps dominate the way Reading has since 2005. And now DCA has their top draw only competing six times in an already short season! And no matter what anyone's definition of dominance is, Reading has absolutely dominated this circuit like no other corps has EVER dominated ANY circuit. I have witnessed many shows where the only reason anyone got within 3 points was just a matter of the judging slate being nice. And BTW...predicting a 4 point spread over the Cabs? This has got to #### some folks off...LOL! Edited June 14, 2014 by VOReason

[BigW]

At (one day of) Ohio's marching band finals last fall, a strong wind was regularly interfering with microphones, including a long bassoon solo that had been well-played when I'd heard it at a local contest a few weeks earlier, but on this occasion two out of every three notes in the solo were inaudible. The band still got a "superior" rating. Ridiculous.

Hmmm. Let me try and answer this in a kind way and try to make some folks think a little in a good way. Much is dependent on OMEA's rubrics here and I'm not familiar with them, and I assume this is an OMEA contest from the description of it. Also, if we're talking ratings instead of numbers, Ratings contests generally tend to err on the side of generosity to the entrants. The rubrics tend to be constructed that way and the adjudicators are also usually clinced to err towards generosity in those kinds of contests. They tend to want everyone feeling more positive about their experience and go home happy with a nifty trophy or plaque.

Also consider the Scholastic nature of the event. Totally different goals to be achieved by the adjudication than a flat out Competition for numbers. With Corps contests, there's less worry about "education" and a whoooole lot more worry about hard numbers and ranking, sometimes done pretty brutally. I know HS Kids are in DCA corps- My sister and I were two of them, but you know going in it's hard-core with DCA and not like a HS ratings competition, where you don't want to make the wussy girl piccolo player who's only in the band because her BFFs are in band, thinks her piccolos too heavy, and wonders why staff begs her to hold the blasted thing up level, cry her eyes out and quit, because her parents will complain to the school board and decry competition. Believe me, that kind of baloney is out there and I've seen it.

All that aside, here's the big rub and the loaded question one must ask- Are you as an adjudicator willing to totally burn and penalize an entire organization of dozens of HS students in a ratings only contest because of poor weather and the fact one kid's mike went south in their solo? Set aside the solo, and what was the rest of the effort of how those many dozen students like? How did the rest of the program that was performed by the other how many kids stand up versus that single solo? Was that solo carrying a major portion of the entire program like the Peacock Variation excerpts the Glassmen did years ago or was it just a small bit of the overall program? THAT kind of stuff is why you get paid the big buxx and take the flak.

Lastly, this was a finals event, and I'll quote a WDCHoF member with a long career in judging, a lot of it in DCA, who said before major contests like that to his people, "Take a finger, don't take the entire hand... (when something like that happens)." Could it be that bouncing a whole HS unit over something like that in all captions down an entire category of excellence for one bad solo might be the same as lopping the whole arm off where the finger suffices, especially in a ratings only show? If the scoring were reflected numerically instead of by ratings only, maybe they get hit a couple of tenths off from every music person, and at Finals, it could mean dropping a spot or two if things are tight, and that might be fair in that circumstance.

Just trying to give some perspective on that situation. Not really a good thing to put the torch to HS kinds if you're trying to cultivate the activity from an educational perspective, and OMEA I'd sure think is trying to do just that, seeing as the MEA means Music Educators' Association.

Now, DCA is another animal. On one hand, you'd sure think DCA competitors using electronics learned from all of DCI's messes and will make sure it's done right and that everything will work as intended that night. It might depend how big the screw up is as to how much a DCA unit gets torched. Personally, I don't hope any DCA unit has bad electronics issues at a contest and that the stuff works and we don't get to find out. But, it's not a perfect world.

[Dan Detweiler]

At the risk of taking this thread further off topic, it seems to me that there is often an underlying tone with some people that the "dominance" of Reading over the last decade was the result of some sort of gift or conspiracy on the part of the judging community or DCA as a whole. It seems to me that the blue team has consistently put a superior product on the field, year in and year out, in all captions. They have managed to put in place a formula, if you will, that attracts the highest talent possible and allows their staff to design a product that is on the cutting edge. Their membership has performed those products at the highest level in the activity, consistently. I have heard arguments about their access to better infrastructure and resources but they have worked hard to develop those.

Now, with that said, it is not up to them to come back to the rest of us. It is our responsibility as their competitors to rise to their level. It is also not the responsibility of the judging community to overtly reward products that are not up to that level for the sole purpose of leveling the playing field as it were. I, for one, look forward to that challenge. I don't want to be "given" anything. When we can put a program on the field that is on par with Bucs, in every caption, according to the criteria stated on the sheets, then we have an argument to make. Until that happens then they will continue to be the ones we all strive to emulate.

I applaud what Reading has accomplished and what they continue to put out there, year in and year out. They are making us all better and that is a good thing. Yes, someday someone is going to beat those guys regularly. I hope it is CV. If it isn't it won't be from lack of effort! Perhaps it will be MBI, or Hawthorne, or C2, or someone else. But to do that we all are having to raise our game to ever higher levels. That, to me, is what this is about...getting better. With every rep. at every rehearsal. From one year to the next. Is there success to be found in failing to reach that lofty goal? Absolutely! I proudly look at the progress my drum corps has made over the last three years, and that progress was made out of a concerted effort by everyone in the organization to raise the bar on what is acceptable and what we would allow the program to be, whether at the recruiting, administrative, design, educational or performance levels.

Reading, you just keep doing what you always do. It gives us all a fantastic goal to shoot for.

Just my two cents.

Dan

[camel lips]

Getting back to Wildwood ,my guess would be for someone to even come close in score to the Buc's they would have to be 5 points better then them .DCA isn't going to let the Bucs loss till someone that much better comes along .As for scores tomorrow night .here's my quess GOOD LUCK TO ALL CORPS IN THE 2014 SEASON

BUCS 82,5

Cabs 78,3

Fusion 73.4

Windsor 61,2

Your spreads may not be too far off the mark but I think you are setting the upper baseline a little high with Bucs. They could establish the baseline somewhere around a 80ish mark but I do not expect them to go above a 81. JMHO

[Kyle B]

Bucs are WAY too high, most spreads are correct, tho I see Windsor being about 7 points away from Fusion, not the 12 listed.

[Kamarag]

After watching some of the competing corps rehearse last week and today, I'm thinking none of the predictions made so far in this thread will be even remotely accurate. I said be prepared for some surprises and I'm sticking to that. If I'm wrong, I'll own it.

Edited June 14, 2014 by Kamarag

[N.E. Brigand]

After watching some of the competing corps rehearse last week and today, I'm thinking none of the predictions made so far in this thread will be even remotely accurate. I said be prepared for some surprises and I'm sticking to that. If I'm wrong, I'll own it.

Let's see if we can guess your meaning here. There have been nine score predictions in this thread. Eight of them are Bucs-Cabs-Fusion-Windsor. One has Cabs ahead of Bucs. So you're probably not predicting Cabs over Bucs, but you might be predicting that Fusion is going to shock the Cabs, or Windsor is going to shock Fusion, or both.

Then there are the scores. In those nine predictions, the average scores are:

1st -- 78.6

2nd -- 76.3

3rd -- 71.7

4th -- 65.3

Maybe the lowest score is in the 70s?

I do hope that the surprise isn't that a corps has stumbled badly in the off-season.

One other possibility concerns what you wrote very early in this thread:

The guard issue (or lack of it) is simply a case of a corps not having its act together. Reading and Hawthorne will roll into Wildwood with a more-or-less complete guard book. They both have for the last few years. Why every corps can't be at least close to complete is a member/staff/admin problem. If any of the others match Bucs/Cabs for completeness I'll be shocked.

So maybe what has surprised you watching rehearsal is that either Fusion's or Windsor's guard is ready to go.

[brassyNsassy]

Spent most of the day between the boardwalk and the show site watching corps rehearsals. Saw some pretty interesting stuff on the boardwalk involving two shirtless men in Lycra pants. The rehearsals were pretty good too.

Not having seen Fusion & Windsor yet, I will go out on a limb and guess.

Bucs

Cabs

Fusion

Windsor

Scores and spreads? Who knows. I don't think it will be a blowout, but I don't think it will be as tight for the top spit as some on here seem to think.

[trptmagnet]

One other possibility concerns what you wrote very early in this thread:

So maybe what has surprised you watching rehearsal is that either Fusion's or Windsor's guard is ready to go.

I'll go with that one!

Enjoying the posts here, esp. from folks who stopped by rehearsals today. I saw Bucs and Fusion at the standstill Bucs Preview. And I saw Fusion at Family and Friends last Saturday, where an insider said, with great technical detail: “Cabs are good”. So not a lot info here, but I’ll offer mine:

Cabs 78.50

Bucs 78.00

Fusion 74.50

Windsor 66.00

[N.E. Brigand]

Anyway, good luck to all the corps tonight in this year's first competition.