TSP01

Could someone please educate me on how the UIL judges score these competitions? By posting this question and the following observations, I am not trying to take anything away from any of the finalists in the state competition. They all put on awesome shows and I commented on a couple of the top 3 that they were going to be hard to beat. Like the post above, I agree that Friendswood and Dawson should have placed higher and am confused on how these competitions are scored. My observations from the finals are as follows: The top 3 bands played very loud at various points in their shows. This is great for a show band but, as mentioned above, I too feel some of the sound quality is lost as the music gets louder. It is my understanding that UIL judges score more to the technical side of the music. I feel the louder music is geared more towards the show aspect of BOA competitions. The color guards of two of the top 3 bands only used flags, pillows, fans, scarves and their arms as equipment with no tosses in their shows. Only Cedar Park's color guard did a technical show. The other two were beautiful shows full of pageantry and I enjoyed watching them but, here again, their shows appeared to be geared more towards a BOA competition. Two of the top 3 bands placed reasonably high in the BOA competition this past weekend. How do their shows move so seamlessly between the BOA and UIL worlds when, as I understand it, the judging is different between the two? As I said above, my comments are in no way intended to detract from the performances of any of the bands. I applaud them all. I will be the first to tell you that our band's prelims performance was better than our finals performance but that seemed to be the case with most of the finalists. I think the effects of nerves, excitement and exhaustion naturally caught up with most of the kids in the finals. I am just curious how the judges arrived at the final standings because, having grown up playing sports and not knowing anything about marching band until my son got involved a few years ago, it would appear to me that the finals judging followed a stricter BOA interpretation rather than a UIL interpretation. If this is going to be the case going forward, this would be useful knowledge for most band directors to know so that they can fashion their performances accordingly.