snares

We definitely are! I think in compiling this there was also just a lot of stuff that I never realized or thought about in general. For example, Vandegrift and Hebron both have pretty similar difficulties with being the bridesmaid/close to gold in BOA, medaling decently often but never quite getting to the gold, up until Hebron did last year, and it was so cool to see Vandegrift get the gold at UIL state this year. I'm rooting for them to take BOASA next year, but also am hoping for a 3-peat from Hebron since I don't think that's ever been done before at the super-regional. I hadn't realized how consistent Keller had become at reaching finals. I always underestimate them and that's a shame on me, but their streak of 7 straight years is incredible. CTJ has been remarkably consistent with their ability to stay in the top half of finals. I also had sort of forgotten about the bands that were dominant in the early 2010's outside of Marcus. Bowie was one of my favorites when I was in high school and I had completely forgotten that they had medaled twice in 13 and 14. I'm excited to go back and include all of BOASA history into something like this, which will definitely be hard since I need to figure out some logistical things since there are basically two generations of high school bands at this point where many of the bands consistently making finals recently didn't back then and vice versa, but that's an entire decade of music history that I love and miss and want to relive since it's been so long at this point. Not only that, but in talking to some people on Saturday at finals, I realized that it's been long enough that most people just don't even know about how different the marching scene was in the 2000's. One parent was shocked when I told them that Bell was the most miraculous band most people had ever seen for a lot of those years. I'm never really a huge history person in general, but there's a lot of history at BOASA that I really want to relive and bring back to life.

This will be a long post, so bear with me here. So for my own curiosity, I've been working on a spreadsheet that displays all of a finalist school's scores and placements for BOA contests over the past 11 years (10 contests, since 2020 was cancelled), and essentially averages them amongst many other things. You'll find a bunch of information in here, such as average placement in BOA and UIL, highest scores in BOA sub-categories, fun facts about the champions, things of that sort. I've added all BOASA Finals and 6A (or 5A for the 2 comps that the highest classifications had not yet been upped) UIL State awards, including 6A from today and BOA from Saturday. In making this, I did have a few decisions I had to make. How far back should I go? 10 contests is an arbitrary number, which is nice and round, and I liked that is sort of encapsulates a generation of marching band without including a too large or small amount of data points. The results would change a decent amount if I included 11 or 9 contests, but I chose 10, again because it is a nice round number that also lines up with UIL state years, and because it also includes one of my all time favorite shows, Marcus 2012 :). Keep in mind that this is how bands perform in finals, so if a band did not make finals, I didn't just include their prelims scores. Because finals are judged differently than prelims, and scores vary heavily between the two, I felt more comfortable just leaving out those data points for those bands who had not made it or attended for various other reasons in that year. Additionally, if a band had less than 3 finals appearances, I still included their results, but not in comparison to the other more consistent finalists, as their averages would not be as statistically accurate as those with more data points. If they did have a record high in a category that didn't involve an average, I would've still added them there (but I do not remember this occurring in anything that I looked at). For example, Avon, Owasso, and Blue Springs were included in the main sheet, but if they want to be more involved then they should come and hang out with us a little more often! Finally, when comparing BOA and UIL, I decided to leave out 2020, only because most bands were not able to attend and there was not an adjacent BOA event to compare data to. I added the disclaimer in the spreadsheet for CTJ since they obviously won a championship and that should not be ignored, but additionally in fairness to the many other bands who chose not to attend, I just didn't include it. Here are some interesting notes I found while looking through it and working on it: FloMo and CTJ both have won their championships only in years that they have also won a caption, meaning that there hasn't been a year in which they've won a caption and not won the championship. So for future reference, if either of them win a caption, you know they're going to be the champ! (sarcasm, somewhat) BOA champions have only won Music in 5 out of the 10 contests Hebron in 2022 is the only champion in the last decade to have won finals without winning GE. There have been 12 Music awarded, 8 of which have gone to Lewisville ISD schools (2 ties, 2014 between Marcus and Leander, and 2015 between Marcus and Hebron) Reagan holds records in all Visual and GE sub-captions, Hebron has records in all Music sub-captions (there are some ties in there in each as well) While it may seem like a long time ago, Marcus still has by far the largest win in BOASA recent history, leading the pack by a massive 2.85 points in 2012. FloMo's Leonardo show is the only show that has come even remotely close to that in 2016, winning by 2.05. Let me know some other things you find that are interesting to you! And if there are any mistakes or anything, let me know and I'll edit them and re-upload! Finally, as I have already mentioned multiple times, this is completely arbitrary. The results would be different if I chose 7 years or 13 years or 18 years. Completely different. 10 years was the perfect amount for what I was looking to compare. I'm thinking about doing this for the most recent 5 years and the past 20 years as well just to have additional spans of time to compare, but as you can imagine, adding that data would take quite a while to what already took me quite a bit of time so it'll take me a while to get to those. A Decade of Texas Marching Band.xlsx

VANDY IS NO LONGER THE BRIDESMAID

I think I'm gonna lean: 1st: Hebron/Vandy 3rd: Vista 4th: TWHS/Reagan 6th: FM 7th: Cedar Ridge 8th: Marcus 9th: CTJ/Coppell 11th: RR 12th: Keller 13th: Pearland 14th: Waxahachi While I think Vista is going to knock it out of the park musically and with percussion, I still think that visual is going to be where they might lose some ground. Hebron and Vandy are both going to be top 3 in all 5 visual and music categories, and I would be surprised if the C/D results from yesterday repeat and Hebron is outside of the top 5. For Vandy's sake, I worry that they might not get 2s and 3s, TWHS and Reagan might scoop in and drop their scores a little bit. They've always been keen on being good at everything but have been just short of 1st, but if their scores aren't as consistent, they might lose ground on Hebron. For Hebron, they just need to not lose Music. Even with how good the other bands sound, the sound and difficulty that Hebron produces is just going to be so hard to beat. I think we've gotten a little complacent with just how incredible they sound with their difficulty that is pretty much unparalleled, and again, I think "Music Content" is going to give Hebron a big enough lead that it might be hard to take a 1 from them in Music. But if they do lose a 1, I think it's Vandy's race to win. I also think CTJ is going to swap places with RR. I don't think CTJ had a perfect run, but watching them right next to each other I still think that they're going to get the edge. RR's percussion is INSANE though. I'm also not going to rule out Marcus making it into the top 7.

Is there still a rule that if a band gets a certain number of 1s they win regardless of score? I can still see Hebron getting 1s across the board in music and stealing a 1 in visual, but I have no idea where C/D and percussion they’ll end up, which are going to be the main two things that hold them back. Even with how good Vista and Vandy sounded, Hebron should have the edge in Music Content. I can still easily see Reagan and TwHS medaling, but who knows! It’s going to be close!

I don’t know what to say, Vista was incredible. I hope their visual scores can keep up, that’s going to be the one of the only things that can possibly hold them back from a medal if not the gold.

C/D is definitely head scratching. Percussion doesn't seem too far off, especially throughout the top, those programs are all so good that there might be some movement from night to night. Hebron's pit tore from the rest of the band once or twice in prelims so that definitely did not help them. But the scores overall are... interesting...

Just out of curiosity, how are penalties given out at UIL? At BOA since the scoring is numerical obviously it just makes sense to see a 0.1 in the box for things like going to early or stuff during warm-up or the many different penalties a band can get, but does UIL have similar penalties, and if so, how are they scored? In my two decades of watching Texas high schools I've never even thought to consider it.

Man, Coppell is incredible

I was hoping that someone would point out the visual aspect of DCI, but there's even more than cleanliness, but the demand. Most high school bands, when they have a difficult section, will park and bark. Some drill is very difficult in high school, but it's literally nothing compared to what DCI groups do. Not only that, but the music difficulty for the most part is still lacking in comparison to DCI groups. I had only seen DCI shows in person (no BOA) since around 2015, and yes, the sound that some groups are able to produce is very similar to what some top cores produce, not quite in volume but in quality, it's not far off. But as far as difficulty is concerned, it's just not even really close. Hebron and Vandegrift both I think come the closest as far as musical technicality and just sheer amount of notes is concerned, but even those crazy triple tonguing sections that both bands do all the time is still short (not sure to what extent) of what most finalist DCI groups do. And again, these crazy difficult sections are on the move more often than not. I can see the argument of Hebron or Vandegrift's difficulty compared to a lower half DCI finalist, but just not top corps (so maybe our definition of a top corp is differing). Don't get me wrong, what we have here is a gift to humanity that should be cherished for years on end. Sitting in BOA Finals on Saturday (my first live BOA event since Leonardo's Dream, can't remember what year that Flomo show was) was shocking because I had never heard a band produce the sounds that Hebron, TWHS, and Vista Ridge namely were producing, but there's more to competing with a drum corps than the sound that a band produces. Finally, a whole 'nother level to be considering is percussion and guard. The Austin schools here at State are some of the best percussion programs I've ever heard from a high school (outside of WGI), but the writing and cleanliness of drumlines, who typically have more members to clean as well, just isn't really on the same level. It's a fun conversation to have, I just felt like I needed to add just a tiny bit of context to It as well. And the fact that reading through these comments, thinking about it on my own, and being able to even consider that it's possible for someone like Hebron to make finals in DCI is insane to consider.

I believe they only announce finalists. Last year some prelims info was sort of leaked but it was only that “the gap between first and second was big”. They should release everything after finals just like BOA.

The audio balance has been my biggest complaint so far. For some bands, it seems like depending on where they put the speakers for their pit completely affects the way the band sounds on the recording. Hebron and the Woodlands both sounded like their pit was 3x as loud as BOA, but Vista actually had a decent balance. Hopefully it's something they work out by tomorrow, because it literally just seems like a mic placement issue.

My goodness Vista. That was incredible. I love UIL because it's just so impossible to know who's going to medal, and Vista is proving that they are contenders for one of them.

I was worried about GE as well for the sake of TWHS, as UIL is always just so much different, but man the Woodlands are clean. Visually and musically. It's hard to know who's going to be a medalist this year, I still think it's Hebron's to win just because of how absolutely dominant their music demand is, but who knows. I bet prelims results will differ dramatically from finals.

I promise I'll stop complaining about it after this, but the mic placement is just off as well. Watching both Hebron and TWHS back to back, the energy they both created at BOASA just is not at all being captured from where they have the microphones. The brass sounds like they're at the back of the field the whole time and the pit sections have been really loud for both bands. Don't know if it's just me. But I just desperately hope that they fix it or adjust it for finals tomorrow, but I know they probably won't. I always look forward to the State Finals videos to be put up on Youtube because that's where the bands are at their best and Box5 did a good job of providing a professional recording of the last competitive performances that most of these bands put out, but it's just so much different with this broadcast. This year I think we're going to get better recordings from band parent's iPhones than the actual recording company.