It’s only fair I come out from under my rock for Mandarins

[Richard Lesher]

Things that set me off are things like announcing Visual Staff for 2026 and then a week later pull the plug on the whole season. You can’t find the announcement anymore, they killed the weblink (you have to go to historic web archives).

Anyway………….

I’m not nearly as angered by Vanguard anymore. The last several years have been every eye opening to the entirety of the activity (DCI).

No one cares……………….

The Corps are not protected by those who are entrusted to be their stewards. The board of directors is the first line of defense to protect the organizations. Next would be the Alumni or Donors, then regulators (State, IRS, City, etc….). Regulators and authorities have bigger real world problems. If the Boards don’t care enough then the regulators really don’t care either so long as they are getting their piece of the pie.

So eventually the Corps have to yield to the Laws of Economics, or actual physical assault victims holding them accountable through lawsuits and police.

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What’s going on with the Mandarins????

We don’t know, and I’m pretty certain their Board of Directors doesn’t even know. They do know they are out of money now.

Here are my findings of the Tax Returns going back to 2009. I use 2009 as my benchmark because that is the first year the IRS required Gaming (Bingo) revenues to be separately disclosed and disclose the Bingo Manager by name. It gives a lot of additional insight to what is going on.

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Items of note:

Mandarins does not report the salaries of any staff or organization officers. This means anyone that gets paid is paid less than $100K.

Mandarins revenue levels do not cross the $2,000,000 threshold and are not required to have an independent Audit in California. Which explains why their 990’s doesn’t foot consistently from year to year.

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For the period of 2009 to 2024 Mandarins cumulative net income is a loss of $330K.

Up until 2019 they had relatively little debt. The highest it got to was $74K in 2014, and fell all the way to ZERO in 2018 (peculiar, because that means even the tiny credit cards would be zeroed out at the close of the annual books).

Then in 2019 debt jumped to $1,700,000 (it looks like investment in buildings and land).

Now………………. BINGO………………….

From 2009 to 2024 Bingo netted Mandarins $2.1M then all the sudden it tanked.

There are four individuals that manage Bingo during this time period.

Their best Bingo year is 2009, netting $566K This person’s tenure netted $1.5M with a low of $96K.

The second person netted $318K over three years.

The third person netted $481K, and this INCLDUED!!!!!!!!!!! TWO COVID YEARS. In 2020 this person lost them $49K, but came roaring back in 2021 netting them $171K.

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OK, here’s where it gets weird. The next person, and latest person according to available tax returns. This latest bingo manager has only net lost them money in the following three years after COVID and following their COVID recovery of the $171K from the previous manager.

WHAT IS GOING ON WITH BINGO??????????

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The BOTTOM LINE

For Fiscal Year 2023 Mandarins had a NEGATIVE BOOK VALUE of $45K. If they liquidated all assets they could not meet financial obligations.

This financial situation continued into 2024, and they had a negative book value of $106K.

It will take another year to pass to get 2025 data, and that assumes there will be someone around to file the report.

These are my findings; these deductions are all out of the tax returns:

https://rct.doj.ca.gov/Verification/Web/Search.aspx?facility=Y

For all I know my data and calculations are wrong. The tax returns are not audited, and there is no verification anything is reported in accordance with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.

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NO ONE CARES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If you want to protect YOUR corps for future generations it personally has to be YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!! that does something about it.

This internet forum is just a mental release valve. DCI wont care, you can write the state, and they will get around to it, who knows………….. whatever…………… there are bigger problems in the world.

No one cared when Cadets folded

No one cared Vanguard Cadets is dead

No one cares Mandarins are in limbo. Remember, they are entering this with a NEGAGATIVE BOOK VALUE!!!!!!!!!!! and they have closed Bingo operations. Blue Devils is running their Bingo now. https://bluedevils.org/bingo/sacramento/

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DCI member corps boards need to get their act together. There’s going to be nothing left of the activity. Excellence among the boards is the exception, not the norm.

TWELVE!!!!!!!!!!!!! out of the last Sixteen fiscal years for the Mandarins were operated at as losses. 

The previous two latest fiscal years reported are technically bankrupt (negative book value). 

They cut off Bingo (the one thing that would have saved them if they corrected it)

They are entering a dormant period while: 1) They have no significant revenue stream 2) owe $1.7M against their property 3) have a negative book value. 

I am most critical of things getting this far before corrective actions are attempted. 

There is no financial room for them to maneuver. 

2025 performance is an unknown, but hey, SCV went into the winter announcing a 2023 season only to pull the plug and find out they were delinquent with the Dept of Justice for 4 years, and the Cadets were going into the season following only to pull the plug only to find out they were being sued into oblivion for SA. 

So yea sure, everything is going to be fine, and the trajectory that led to this point over the last 16 years will magically all come up roses.  

[Jurassic Lancer]

Man … if anyone needed a TL;DR, it’s you

[OldCorpsGuy]

Sorry but it’s been pretty obvious since 1972 that DCI doesn’t care about the corps. 

[Tim K]

1 hour ago, OldCorpsGuy said:

Sorry but it’s been pretty obvious since 1972 that DCI doesn’t care about the corps. 

The original directors of DCI were giants (not in the BAC sense of giants, with the exception of George Bevilaqua who was one of the originals). They loved the activity, they loved their corps, they loved their kids. They were visionaries, but their vision was not 20/20. Competition was key and success was based on the improvement of their corps. I’m not sure they cared about other corps not because they were selfish as much as they were competitors and their attention was on their corps. They also did not realize that as the top corps improved by leaps and bounds, the activity on the local level was dying. There are many reasons why corps began to fold in large numbers that had nothing to do with DCI such as changing times and interests, better school music programs, more activities for young people, and of course costs, but I don’t think DCI intended to help individual corps.

In this situation, what do we expect DCI to do? Management wise, each corps is independent, not a branch of DCI. The reality is some corps are better managed than others, some are more frugal, some have donors with big pockets. Others as we know are not managed well and some face more challenges, some of their own making, others not. However, as perhaps the best known commentator on DCP mentions frequently, DCI is the corps. Directors make the proposals and then vote. So the corps directors have to come together if they want to help individual vcorps.

[Jeff Ream]

10 hours ago, OldCorpsGuy said:

Sorry but it’s been pretty obvious since 1972 that DCI doesn’t care about the corps. 

DCI is the corps. It’s not like the ncaa 

[IllianaLancerContra]

1 hour ago, Jeff Ream said:

DCI is the corps. It’s not like the ncaa 

NCAA doesn’t have any real power; it is in conferences, esp the Big10, ACC, & SEC 

[Slingerland]

The economics of the activity are unsustainable, and I don't honestly know that there is a path forward for those who don't have reliable gaming operations. And even then, if you need a side business to hustle up enough cash to operate your charity, because the charity isn't able to fundraise enough from the community to support it on its own merits, maybe that charity needs to look hard at why they're not connecting and whether their charitable purpose has run its course.

There are a few other corps that are going into this off-season also looking at stripping back on expenditures (which I'd normally say is a healthy approach), but the fundamental sickness of the activity goes beyond that, in that the very model of business the WC corps use - national touring for the whole summer, international membership, top dollars paid for designers and sound equipment, etc, etc, etc simply can't be supported by the money earned from performances and the amount of funds that are reasonably made from donations, tour fees, and merch sales. 

Short of turning back the clock so that the kids are local and live at home during pre-tour, the shows on weekends are arrived at on school busses (until the "big tour" starts in late July), the designers are ok making $5k instead of $30k for their work, the staffers are primarily recent age-outs making $2k for the summer, and there are enough shows for all of the corps within 100-200 miles from home base to fill a show calendar for late June/early July, I don't know what the future would look like. 

Edited October 31, 2025 by Slingerland

[OldCorpsGuy]

1 hour ago, Jeff Ream said:

DCI is the corps. It’s not like the ncaa 

So as we’ve watched the activity destroy itself, we still insist it’s all ok because the corps directors vote on all the policies. Yet at no point as we watch drum corps going down the drain we can’t say “these guys may know music but obviously have no idea how to run the activity as a whole”. That’s what’s been happening for decades. I guess when all the corps are gone, maybe folks will realize there’s a problem. Facepalm. 

[Slingerland]

2 minutes ago, OldCorpsGuy said:

So as we’ve watched the activity destroy itself, we still insist it’s all ok because the corps directors vote on all the policies. Yet at no point as we watch drum corps going down the drain we can’t say “these guys may know music but obviously have no idea how to run the activity as a whole”. That’s what’s been happening for decades. I guess when all the corps are gone, maybe folks will realize there’s a problem. Facepalm. 

Corps directors don't really run the show at some of the voting corps. Staff members and designers do (see how the proposal to limit the amount of individual mics on horn players died a quick death - the CDs didn't even get a chance to vote on it because the designer/instructor room at Januals wouldn't pass it).  

[OldCorpsGuy]

13 minutes ago, Slingerland said:

Corps directors don't really run the show at some of the voting corps. Staff members and designers do (see how the proposal to limit the amount of individual mics on horn players died a quick death - the CDs didn't even get a chance to vote on it because the designer/instructor room at Januals wouldn't pass it).  

So I guess we just stand by while these guys destroy the activity for good? I’m not being snarky, I’m serious. What do we do?