JimF-LowBari Posted June 8, 2022 Share Posted June 8, 2022 (edited) 2 minutes ago, Poppycock said: Oh my! And you paid for that Jim? It’s like a bad haircut - ask for your money back sweetie. Good, bad or indifferent I consider it giving money to the drum corps activity to help it out. Don’t understand the snotty attitude…. Edited June 8, 2022 by JimF-LowBari 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fred Windish Posted June 8, 2022 Share Posted June 8, 2022 (edited) gunther - I am dismayed to read your impressions of what is, and has been, the organization known as Drum Corps Associates (DCA). I assume your name really is Gunther, but can say I never met anyone named Gunther during my many years participating with DCA in different capacities. It appears, your corps had a disappointing attempt to earn membership in DCA. That happened frequently to other corps through the years. It all comes down to scores. Nothing more. I believe you misunderstand what DCA was/is. I call it a “kitchen table” group. There are NO employees in the typical sense. There is no physical office space other than in a few private homes. No receptionist to answer the phone. The business of DCA is handled for the most part by volunteers who have actual employment elsewhere. These are, in effect, dedicated volunteers. They bring a variety of work experiences to their efforts. From low hourly wage earners to corporate executives . . . in their private lives. Many of these dedicated drum corps enthusiasts have donated great amounts of time and money to keep DCA functional as best they can. I take personal offense to your claims that DCA has never done any marketing for the corps. Simply untrue. DCA, the organization, has always been Championship-centric. It is Labor Day Weekend that pays the bills. Each drum corps is solely responsible for its own operating revenue. Historically, DCA Member corps benefited directly from Championship profit sharing. That includes Championship ticket sales, Yearbook sales, Event Sponsorships and advertising, etc. These days, the Championship revenue is not at all what it had been in the past. The problems facing DCA now are really NOT of the organizing group’s making. The present team is doing the best with what it has to work with. You might have noticed, America is in some decline presently. Political decisions are creating conditions that make putting a drum corps on the field, and feeding a family back home, under a real strain. Discretionary spending, like travel, entertainment, membership dues, etc. are being cut back. When a young adult is forced to pay $5-7 per gallon gas, 35% more for food, 20% more for rent and utilities, 15% more for school, more for cell phones, etc., some will maybe decide not to do drum corps right now. Yes, DCA is suffering now and will have less participants. I am hopeful it will get through this period. But, really, what can DCA specifically do to reverse the stress being placed on each individual corps? On each individual member? On a prospective sponsor of a competition event? The money just isn’t there. Edited June 9, 2022 by Fred Windish 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Poppycock Posted June 9, 2022 Share Posted June 9, 2022 (edited) 1 hour ago, Fred Windish said: DCA, the organization, has always been Championship-centric. It is Labor Day Weekend that pays the bills. Fred I appreciate your passion and insights about the DCA organization. I get it and understand it’s root’s thanks to Jeff, Jim and others. Labor Weekend might have been the right choice for a championship when the majority of the membership was primarily older adults. However any younger student worth their salt most likely will be or should be performing with either their high school or college marching band that weekend. Band director’s are pretty unforgiving and have little tolerance for absences when football season begins. Either way I wish all the DCA corps the best. Edited June 9, 2022 by Poppycock 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JimF-LowBari Posted June 9, 2022 Share Posted June 9, 2022 16 minutes ago, Poppycock said: Fred I appreciate your passion and insights about the DCA organization. I get it and understand it’s root’s thanks to Jeff, Jim and others. Labor Weekend might have been the right choice for a championship when the majority of the membership was primarily older adults. However any younger student worth their salt most likely will be or should be performing with either their high school and/or college marching band that weekend. Band director’s are pretty unforgiving and have little tolerance for absences when football season begins. Either way I wish all the DCA corps the best. Having run into college/Labor Day weekend problems 40+ years ago the thought finally hit me. Is this one of the reasons why DCA weekend crowd seems so “mature”? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gunther Posted June 9, 2022 Share Posted June 9, 2022 Mr Windish - Your assumptions about me and corps affiliation are totally wrong. I am aware of you, though. You allege that DCA did marketing for member corps. Then please give us 3 relevant, major examples spanning its existence. You wrongly try to infer that my corps experience was poor under DCA. Very wrong - no names please. And no again, you have failed to paint me as an ingrate or unhappy or worse. As for being 'championship-centric', well, wrong again. Each week, at each contest, DCA provided judges only but still insisted on calling them sanctioned DCA shows. No participation in advertising. No investment in the cost of any contest. No reduction of judging fees to help a struggling sponsor. No contribution to the host/sponsors' operating costs for the contest. No assistance to corps with unexpected financial distress. DCA always took its cut first, no matter what. The major part of DCA's history was only for NE corps. It's an important reason why nobody outside NE cared about them. DCA after many years only paid lip service to attracting corps from elsewhere than NE. Labor Day weekend was not their original championship date but taken from the old Northeast Circuit. It was intended to weaken (kill) Northeast Circuit. But in doing this, DCA corps had to pay elevated room/food prices on a premier holiday when they could have chosen any other date just as well. Keep in mind that DCA did not pay for those items for themselves but assessed the members for them. Again, DCA took judging fees. Also, the DCA leadership paid each officer and some had generous expense accounts; they were not volunteers. This was not a charity run by unpaid volunteers. "Revenue sharing" was more an exercise in political power than something equitable. Have you been part of the allocations? Have you seen the formulas? It doesn't sound like it. You did not comment on the many years of terrible video products or why DCA could never figure out how to give people a decent product but still took their money. Why did DCA allow its corps membership make-up of adults taken from them without a whimper? Now, college age people are in DCI and the great DCA is left with 14 year-olds trying to make music. The young, physically immature don't have the resonance of mature players, the sound is inferior and it's obvious. The young teen players don't have the physical/athletic skills for demanding maneuvers. By any measure, DCA is an inferior product and has been for a long time. The DCA has been in decline for a long time and the challenges affect every corps and association. DCA has failed to understand the changes, or to anticipate them and has not met them with any real success. That's because from its inception, it was designed and operated only as a judging association seeing to its own wants first. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jeff Ream Posted June 9, 2022 Share Posted June 9, 2022 14 hours ago, JimF-LowBari said: And some of the videos were definitely home made products. Felt sad for the corps with lesser budgets or contacts. Name corps were at school stadiums with interesting camera work. And some fans spread out in the stands. Other corps out in a field with traffic going by and no audience. Few had camera in the stands and a handheld within the corps. Problem was person with handheld was in Street clothes. So on the shots from the stands they stood out like a sore thumb 🤦♂️ i felt so bad for CT...the uniforms in the day light were totally lost 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jeff Ream Posted June 9, 2022 Share Posted June 9, 2022 5 hours ago, gunther said: The real question should be 'Is the DCA around & alive now"? DCA has never been anything but a judging association, from DAY ONE (1). They never acted as a marketing association for their members. They only gave a corps a parade referral if they were judging it. The videos, except for '93, have not even been amateurish. That video was the best but DCA did not invest a nickel in it; it was all the producers' money. Then the DCA would not renew but went to another great mismanagement triumph with a product that had no color or sound. They don't have pride in their image and don't promote the corps members. Ever! In all their undertakings, they were striving to become ept. DCA was begun in true reactionary thinking to control judging after a number of truly bad judging jobs of the best senior corps in '63. The chief judges were blatantly unwilling to get things right. They have badly mismanaged their monopoly. Over the years, many competing corps have been treated badly to the point where the corps realized they were not going to get a fair shake and decided to do something else with their time and money. In the '90's, there was a widespread quote about them: This DCA is for when you don't have enough frustration in your life. the sad thing for video or sound is it costs money. DCA doesn't have DCi's budget, so you buy what you can afford. 97 was the all time worst, but the Mike Symonds years weren't all that bad. I haven't watched Box5 for DCA other than last year ( cause i was at the shows they broadcast), but their BOA stuff was really good last fall. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jeff Ream Posted June 9, 2022 Share Posted June 9, 2022 5 hours ago, Poppycock said: Believe that’s a bit embellished! Unless these corps were filming shows in a basement, I would think most, if not all had stadiums to perform in while being filmed. Perhaps due diligence was in short supply. 🤔 well....no, but i appreciate your opinion as you obviously don't live up here. Schools were quite unwilling to allow crowds of any kind of size. the schools corps used luckily had an in tied to the corps in most cases, but weren't willing to pack an ### every 18 inches as far as a crowd. Even come fall some places still had some limitations in place for sporting events or band competitions. why? Liability. Say someone got sick. Schools didn't want any kind of lawsuit to deal with. And as said before, at the time you need to get contracts in place, aka the spring, schools weren't willing to sign off on it. as much as you may want to believe come May a corps pull a show host out of their ### and get everything booked, realistically no they couldn't. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jeff Ream Posted June 9, 2022 Share Posted June 9, 2022 5 hours ago, Poppycock said: If I was a judge in a predominantly NE circuit I would protect the circuit first too! My mindset would be nobody is going to come in our house from outside the circuit and push these NE corps around. If they don’t like it then travel more or start your own circuit. I would put ‘em in the stands for the night show. the problem is in the other regions, no one pulled in crowds big enough to try and got it alone even at their DCA shows. And DCA flew a lot of people around the country to get DCA judges exposure to all of the corps. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jeff Ream Posted June 9, 2022 Share Posted June 9, 2022 3 hours ago, Poppycock said: Fred I appreciate your passion and insights about the DCA organization. I get it and understand it’s root’s thanks to Jeff, Jim and others. Labor Weekend might have been the right choice for a championship when the majority of the membership was primarily older adults. However any younger student worth their salt most likely will be or should be performing with either their high school or college marching band that weekend. Band director’s are pretty unforgiving and have little tolerance for absences when football season begins. Either way I wish all the DCA corps the best. I agree the time to look into alternatives for Labor Day has been here for a while as membership has gotten younger. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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