Finals Week Improvement

[Penguin]

Memories, indeed. The rivalry was always fun.

And yes, about 2003. LVK's guard, CNYC's drumline, and Raiders' brass would have been a sight to see!

And, it's pronounce more kinda like "Why cough?".

[vaguardguy]

wow... this brings back some... weird memories... I remember having a "not-so-good" performance in prelims, and sitting in 12th place, then in semis having like the best show ever, and since we felt like our "worst" show ever got us into 12th we were surely to make finals... and then our score ended up going DOWN!! AND added on the fact that if it had only rained 30 minutes earlier we would have been there... man... what a let down!

Now that this thread is officially way off topic, why not reminisce about a pretty interesting summer (sor mods).

I don't think anybody had a good show the night of Prelims. We went on within 30min. of the show restarting after the rain delay, and remember how the field looked like this:

(yes, ugliest corps uniforms in DCI...moving on...)

The podium had to be pushed back to avoid floating away, the pit was a swamp, and the field squished and squirted up mud on every step. Those white pants needed cleaning bad after that show!

We, along with probably every corps who advanced to Thursday, had a much better show. We too were surprised to find our score also dropped. In fact, the only corps in the 12th-15th range whose score improved from Tuesday was CNYC. The recaps tell a pretty good story. Every corps had its own very remarkable strengths and weaknesses; successes and downfalls.

The thing you have to understand East Coast II/III corps and how their scores improve over the season is that most of them are primarily weekend corps. A few have weekday camps and some others have a very short move-in, but none tour as extensively as many of their midwest counterparts. Most of us never peak. Every rehearsal is so very important because our net rehearsal time is so much shorter than yours. What we accomplish in two days in August is probably so much more than your corps can accomplish because while you're fine-tuning the details of your show, we just barely started cleaning. We had so much more room for improvement. I can't speak on behalf of the Raiders and CNYC, but I know (and Revo members will attest) we were pulling 16hr rehearsals as though it were move-in. Again, it's not a case of one corps really being better than the other. It's more the nature of how two very different styles of corps design their shows and manage their time.

Anyways, you got to go to Finals the next two summers. I think you can smile and let us have our one shining moment in the sun :) ; you got yours the next summer. We got to be the only DivIII corps in the post-'02 Finals format ('01 was the last summer of the 5 DivII/7 DivIII corps Finals) to earn a spot at the expense of of a DivII corps, and did it with one of the smallest corps to make finals at 47 members. II/III scores can be very erratic (I almost typed erotic, which they certainly are not), and it takes judges a while to get good reads on the shows. That's one of the best parts of II/III: on "any given night", there'll probably be an upset. If you want to talk about real injustices, I'll gladly bring up the situation with our '04 colorguard . We all know the rules, and you take your wins with your losses; no one wants to hear us old vets whine and moan anyways :sshh: .

By the way, Memphis Sound is one of the few corps I can honestly say improves every single year. Not many corps can say that .

Edit: Boo on hot-linking images that need re-sizing

Edited December 13, 2005 by vaguardguy