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It is time for the business of the activity to evolve


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1 hour ago, MikeRapp said:

The very nature of dci ensures that there will be almost no change in the power rankings year to year. The richest corps remain so by being able to recruit away the most experienced members from second tier corps. This ensures that they will be able to remain top tier and therefore pay the best educators more money...and the cycle continues.

Mandarins remains the lone outlier so far, but they have no realistic chance of medaling in the next three years imo. Might even say five.

It seems there are two ways to break this mold: have your corps director be revealed as a fraud and habitual abuser; and/or pay a #### ton of money to a tier one corps caption leaders and have them bring their best students with them.

I don't see the correlation there.  Maybe the other way around - attract the best educators and remain top tier.  I really and truly don't think BD has rigged the system.  I think they're just incredibly good at what they do.  

Mike

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24 minutes ago, MikeN said:

I don't see the correlation there.  Maybe the other way around - attract the best educators and remain top tier.  I really and truly don't think BD has rigged the system.  I think they're just incredibly good at what they do.  

Mike

How would Music City, Troopers, Et al attract the “best educators,” when three fourths of their annual membership are high schoolers who have never marched in a world class corps? 

You could have the best teachers in the world at many of these corps and never crack the top 10. There literally isn’t enough money in the activity to attract the Blue Devils staff to move to a non-medalist corps.

To be perfectly clear, I am not complaining about this, I’m making a patently obvious statement. DCI is a trade organization that is kept in business due to the drawing power and sheer financial means of about eight organizations at most. As a result, not a cause, rankings will not significantly change from year to year.

Long term competitive success in this activity comes from a combination of factors that only a half dozen or so corps possess. The most important one is the comparative age and experience of your marching members. Just look at the resumes of the Blue Devils guard members, they are all essentially semi professional dance competitors who are being trained by elite performance groups. How in the world would Troopers compete with BD scouring high school ranks every year for new guard members?

Talent attracts talent. This attracts the best teachers, which provides competitive success, and the most money—while at the same time systematically weakening the competitiveness of the corps outside that top tier.

It would be as if Major League Baseball had no salary cap, nothing but annual contracts, and no trade rules. A half dozen teams would make the playoffs every single year and one of those would win the World Series.

I am thrilled with the recent success of Mandarins, but I would lay pretty ###### good odds that their guard staff will be at one of the elite corps very soon, and most of their best guard members will follow. And Mandarins will fall back to their previous competitive level.

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I want to remain clear here. This is clearly a rigged system but it is probably the best one to adopt. As long as kids are paying to be in a drum corps, and not the other way around (as it is in professional and college athletics) the system we have is the only one that is realistic or even likely legal. Scoring will begin in the 70s and the corps that are historically the best will rank top to bottom...and the season will slowly march forward with tiny incremental scoring movements, almost all somehow magically up, and the corps that start ahead will finish ahead. It’s been this way forever and will remain this way, and the cycle will continue.

I am old enough to remember when the NCAA didn’t have a cap on roster sizes. The most powerful football schools used to have over 150 or more kids on the sidelines, offering non-athletics scholarships to elite high schoolers just so they wouldn’t play for other schools in their leagues. It was comical.

Edited by MikeRapp
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3 hours ago, MikeRapp said:

The very nature of dci ensures that there will be almost no change in the power rankings year to year. The richest corps remain so by being able to recruit away the most experienced members from second tier corps. This ensures that they will be able to remain top tier and therefore pay the best educators more money...and the cycle continues.

Mandarins remains the lone outlier so far, but they have no realistic chance of medaling in the next three years imo. Might even say five.

It seems there are two ways to break this mold: have your corps director be revealed as a fraud and habitual abuser; and/or pay a #### ton of money to a tier one corps caption leaders and have them bring their best students with them.

If you want to talk about how groups rise & fall, it seems like you also need to account for Crown/Bluecoats/Scouts/PR as well as the ones you allude to.

DCI definitely rewards the top groups - no argument there. If you are at the top, you have an easier time recruiting, you get better sponsorship deals, you sell more t-shirts, you get more donations, the works.

But all that isn't enough to keep you on top if your on-field product slips.

If BD came out with a bad show next year, they would fall. If they did it a couple of years in a row, they would fall further and their staff would start eyeing greener pastures. Kids might even, gasp, go somewhere else if they wanted a shot at a ring. Don't believe me? Look at what happened to Cavies after Gaines left. That's how quickly a group that earned 11 medals in 12 years can drop!

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1 hour ago, MikeRapp said:

But they won’t. That’s my point. DCI competition is largely a self fulfilling prophecy.

A lot of people would have said the Cavies were a self-fulfilling prophesy after finals 2011. At that moment in time, looking back 12 years, Cavies had 3 bronze, 3 silver, 5 gold while BD had 2 bronze, 5 silver, 4 gold.

If BD has dominated since then while the Cavies fell, doesn't that show that these things are not self-fulfilling?

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I’ve been trying to come up with an idea for improving the finances and I think I’ve hit a brick wall. I think the key to running a successful non profit is - a large endowment. That way you can plan strategically instead of just breaking even until next season. Know any sugar daddies / mamas?

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2 hours ago, cybersnyder said:

I’ve been trying to come up with an idea for improving the finances and I think I’ve hit a brick wall. I think the key to running a successful non profit is - a large endowment. That way you can plan strategically instead of just breaking even until next season. Know any sugar daddies / mamas?

You need the support of several local and regional entities that want you to succeed. Once that happens you can have enough cash flow to build a year round entity that has a world class drum corps, not the other way around. This is really the only practical way to sustain something as expensive and risky as a world class drum corps.

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44 minutes ago, MikeRapp said:

You need the support of several local and regional entities that want you to succeed. Once that happens you can have enough cash flow to build a year round entity that has a world class drum corps, not the other way around. This is really the only practical way to sustain something as expensive and risky as a world class drum corps.

I'm still trying to figure out who the customer is, usually it's the people that are paying. So, the fans in the stands? The members? The donors? All of the above?

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On 8/30/2019 at 3:10 PM, xandandl said:

1. no TV; people listened to radio to distract/entertain them. (no cell phones or computers either.)

2. no air-conditioning for the common masses

3. patriotism was high and crowd seeking cheap entertainment as nation was just coming out of throes of The Great Depression which was not fully overcome until WWII (check any history or economics faculty at any institution of higher learning.)

4. Montreal and Buffalo crowds have been the largest for DCI era; density of population in the Northeast may be a factor as well.

Buffalo wasn’t even larger than most Madison crowds

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