cpb161

Most schools that existed back at a certain time point was military at some point, it was the original style. Richardson 1970 has a video of them on YouTube performing one of my favorite military drills of all time. The only schools I know that have switched back and forth are schools with struggling band programs that tend to swap out directors a lot. Marshall High School switched to military at some point in the early 2010s when the program wasn’t doing too well, now they’re corps again and are doing better than they ever have, finally getting consistent sweepstakes.

Depends on the judge, clean difficulty will help though. (Edit: example, if two shows are so close together in cleanliness it’s hard to say who was better, but one band has a harder book, it’s safe to assume that band wins out) I’ve gotten to see Queen City in person and I can also assure they are not disappointing on difficulty. Atlanta won’t be playing around either- they’re a consistent 4A state finalist that recently dropped, and I haven’t seen the entire show from anything but the goal sidelines yet, but I’d be willing to assure they’re bringing a 4A finals show with them.

I've heard Van Alstyne is pretty on fire this year, didn't make state in 2017. I see them placing well in finals, along with Holliday who won Area B and from what I can tell, is a MASSIVE 3A band this year. In the end though, I expect a full medal sweep from Area C. Mineola in 1st, and 2nd and 3rd being duked out between Queen City and Atlanta. The first two mentioned Area B bands being my dark horses to sneak into a medal, as well as Yoe. The bands I think that will appear in state finals, no particular order. Mineola Queen City Atlanta Redwater White Oak Van Alstyne Holliday Yoe Whitesboro Clifton or Howe, but going with Clifton, just thought Howe deserved mention.

Leander turned in 2202. I believe the 6A cutoff starts at 2190. Basically that means if the cutoff moves up, Leander drops to 5A. since I doubt they’ll move it up by less than 12 lol.

Longview just got a new director that’s had some very good state finalist military bands, and I’ve heard she intends to take them to the area competition too. That combined with Longview likely dropping to 5A could actually make them very successful if they keep improving back to where they usually are. In the case of Nederland, they just don't seem to care about competition at all, never attends area either despite that they would be extremely competitive most years. My predictions for the contest overall, these are who I think will win class 6A: Kingwood (I’m curious, have Longview and Kingwood ever actually gone head to head before?) 5A: Lindale 4A: Spring Hill 3A: New Diana 2A: Beckville

Both Lindale and Whitehouse are military bands, never thought I’d ever see multiple military style bands in a DFW area finals. Really cool!

That’s not a sound idea, one rogue judge could ruin it for anybody. There’s a rule that a minimum of 2 bands in a region have to make area. So if 0-1 bands get a 1, the next highest ratings go to Area, if there’s a tie for ratings, the judges break it. Personally I don’t like removing the 2 to area rule, I know it’s a relic from the days when going to Area was just about finishing top 2 in the region, but it’s a good failsafe if too many bands don’t get 1s in an area. In 2005, 1A Area C (Today’s 2A), had exactly 3 bands attended area, only 1 of those bands had even received a 1 at region. I know it’s unlikely for that to happen again as more bands are getting 1s than ever, but if it did, it would be an oddly hilarious but definitely ridiculous situation.

I love the idea of every year area, and I love BOA SA. I really hope UIL finds a way to work it out scheduling wise, and not have ALL area contests on the same weekend, but also not make it conflict with BOA SA. It could be possible to let areas pick their own dates too, 2A-4A areas could then pick to use the BOA SA weekend since I highly doubt a single school in the state of those classes will have a complaint with that.

Ah, so a good way to put it is either if there are more than 1250 schools above the enrollment of 104.9 in the UIL, that's when UIL will likely add the 7A class? After all, at that point, it would be impossible to make 2A-6A all have 250 or less schools.

Didn’t 4A only have about 190 schools last alignment? That may just be the number of 4As playing football I’m thinking of, or it could’ve been 200 before opt ups. Thanks for the info though! I’ve always wondered how exactly it works.

Poteet, Forney, and Highland Park make state, next 2 spots are between Midlothian, Red Oak, North Forney, and Royse City has shown lots of improvement that makes me want to consider them a dark horse. So I’ll put those 7 as my locks for finals, the next 3 spots are anyone’s game as so many bands have moved divisions/areas. I feel like if I HAD to pick 3 based off what I’ve seen, Texas High, Kaufman, and Lindale, unless there’s another solid band from the DFW I’m forgetting about.

I could be wrong, but I think they’re in the upper 2000s (2700ish) in terms of actual enrollment, UIL doubles the enrollment of 11-12th grade only campuses when counting for the rank order, which is why they’re huge on there. But to be fair, at larger schools you don’t really have many 10th graders and hardly any 9th grades ever play on varsity, so they essentially have mostly the talent pool of a 9-12th grade school in the 5000s when you get technical about it.

My band has a strange history, I believe there’s multiple times we placed in the top 10 at the state marching contest and proceeded to receive a 2 at UIL either the following year or the following state year. We also once bronze medaled and didn’t make state the next year, it’s mostly just odd inconsistency.

Probably not much if at all, I believe the idea was to split into D1 and D2 like football, perfectly splitting the division in half. UIL will realign it as they normally would, and if the rule passed, bands would be split down the middle of 6A into a D1 and D2

I’ll check when I get to my computer, but I think United is entered as a Non-Varsity group, I didn’t enter those groups since they can’t advance to area. Also I could’ve sworn they started as 6A this alignment, but I guess either I was wrong or something changed

Last thread I'll make for awhile, for anyone who wants to dicuss 3A state, here is the spreadsheet. Look at the bottom and click the 3A bands tab. All I know, is that whatever band wins this, they will be out of Region 4 (Or Whitesboro), Mineola, Queen City, New Diana, New Boston, Redwater, White Oak, Atlanta, and Winnsboro all exist in this region, and every single one can make state finals, and all but Winnsboro have been in state finals at least once since 2013. 2 have won state championships, multiple have been to the state finals in a larger conference. Easily the most brutal line up in an area, proportional to the conference.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OYWoq0Sy186KraWX39QbQhpc3ulglnd1xfMR3opsFOw/edit?usp=sharing Spreadsheet with every single 5A band in the state in their region, and area, with markings for bands with past achievements or have recently changed conferences. I still need to highlight all the Area Finalists, but other than that, it should be complete, let me know if I missed anything!

How will Prosper's new high school affect them? I would assume it'll take a couple years for the new high school to get a full 9th-12th grade, meaning Prosper probably stays 6A for one more alignment.

2 contests with the same name, one hosted in Mount Pleasant on October 12th, and another hosted in Commerce (I believe at the A&M Commerce stadium) on the 19th. For simplicity sake I’ll refer to the two as the MP and Commerce contests. There’s not much to say about Mount Pleasant, the following bands will be in attendance, in schedule order Spring Hill, Pleasant Grove, and Liberty-Eylau placed 2nd, 6th, and 10th at 4A area finals respectively last year. Marshall and Pine Tree are decent 5As that tend to place in the lower-mid end of area. So they’re pretty easy favorites for the top 5 here, with Spring Hill likely taking home the gold. Though due to being military style, they probably won’t walk away with the guard and percussion captions. Awards - 7 finalists Best percussion Best guard Best in each class (2A-5A) The Commerce contest on the other hand is much more interesting, lots of good 3A and 5A bands here, such as Midlothian who finished in the 5A Area C finals in 2017, and is likely looking to take one of the opened state spots. The following bands are in attendance: There are 10 finalists, I am not sure what caption awards there are, if any, or how the contest is judged. It’s safe to safe Midlothian and Azle will be up top, as both are 5A Area finalists from 2017, probably looking to claim a state spot this year. Redwater, Queen City, and Winnsboro are all likely picks to make state finals in 3A this year, they come from a very competitive area where almost always all the bands that make state finish well into the top 10, so this will give more insight into who makes it out of Area C alive, though these bands have gone head to head already. Anything can change.

These results aren't terribly big of a deal to most people here, but give some great insights if you're following 3A state, as many 3A big names went to these two contests: PG Invitational: (Texarkana, TX) Classes were done by band size, rather than school size, with classes A-D. (All of these top 4 are MAJOR 3A state contenders, Atlanta was 4A for awhile and usually made state finals, Queen City placed 4th at 3A state in 2017) Finals Results 1st - Redwater (Percussion and Guard Captions) 2nd - Atlanta 3rd - Queen City 4th - Winnsboro 5th - Liberty-Eylau 6th - Quitman Prelims Scores (UIL Region Scoring for Band and captions, this is very long) Four States Contest (Texarkana, TX) I did not stay for results, so I do not have UIL style ratings. This contest is one round only and they announce the top 3 and captions. 1st - Redwater 2nd - Pleasant Grove 3rd - Texarkana Arkansas High Colorguard - Redwater Percussion - Atlanta Bands in attendance:

Mineola is only 3A, and just beat bands that placed as high as 5th at the 4A state marching contest last year. Very impressive, I think we found our likely 3A champs for this year.

PG was probably closer to around 600 kids when you were here, interestingly enough though the community and district is growing faster than ever. Freshman class is almost 50% bigger than the senior class thanks to lots of move-ins. Only time will tell if it will speed up enough to push the school up a division (400ish kids is a lot of growing to do to hit 5A), but it would be very interesting. Not sure how the band would fair though, private lesson teachers and techs aren't exactly abundant in this area and those are pretty key to being successful in the larger divisions.

Even most 4As are 2A in BOA, there are some that would be in 1A and could be very interesting competition, including North Lamar actually. Argyle would probably be barely 2A, although Canton would easily be in 1A. As far as who's going as a whole, I don't expect any smaller groups to make the trip though, but I'm interested to see what the "Tex-pocalypse" people are talking about brings!

My band heard them warming up at the Mineola contest, we could tell they were angry about missing state finals in 2016 just by how they counted. They counted louder than other bands twice their size in finals were playing, and it drowned out everything around us. Ever since then we've used that as our model for how intense we want to be.

Everyone over at Pleasant Grove is really happy for you guys! We're glad to see more of Texarkana representing well About the contest as a whole, we had a rough finals run but stayed 6th, but we were 1 point away from 5th in prelims with some weird scores (9, 3, 11, 4, and 3) Our music scores actually went up in finals and our marching scores went down a lot, which is weird because we had a bad music run in finals, not marching. But oh well, congrats to everyone who advanced!