bchorn

When I hear schools like Hebron and Vandergrift perform incredibly difficult music, I wonder how long the kids have been learning the music. I know the musicians at these schools and others like them are a better than average...but still...I can't imagine the kids got for the music for the first time at the beginning of summer band. Do they get their music at the end of the previous school year so that they can work on it throughout the summer?

I honestly don't care about the acoustics. I'm tired of those Indianapolis schools having the luxury every year of participating in grand nationals while sleeping in their own beds and racking up all these finishes in finals. Let's see those schools start paying for trips to DFW and having to compete with the big boys of Texas.

I think BOA should just move Grand Nationals to Dallas! I know it will never happen but I can't let my dream die. Lets see how well those Indy bands do when stacked up with all of Texas' finest!

It wasn't supposed to be a 6A state year last year so that's why last year doesn't count.

Honestly, I'm a little disappointed by the switch to every year state marching contests by 5A/6A schools. I think it makes total sense for the 1A-4A to go to every year but the big schools that like to factor in out of state marching contests this will be a blow. Just look at how few of TX bands are going to Grand Nationals this year due to it being a state marching contest year for them. So yeah, it's great there will be more opportunities for 5A/6A schools to advance to state...but it'll be disappointing to see fewer bands going to Grand Nationals.

ok, that doesn't seem like a forced ranking to me though. I still think its possible to see when bands are close to each other using ordinal ranks just by looking at comparing collective ordinal ranks. CTJ and Reagan were tied in collective ordinal ranks and Cedar Ridge was just 2 ranks behind them. And there was a huge gap between Cedar Ridge and Round Rock...9 ranks. So the top 3 were in a class of their own...and then there was a big drop off after that.

Are you sure judges are being forced to rank bands? When I look at this score sheet, I see scores underneath each "rank" assigned to a band. So to me it seems like judges are just scoring bands off of a score sheet...and their scores are being used to determine ordinal ranks. https://www.smbc.uiltexas.org/area/results/files/area-22_6A Area D.pdf

I only have the Top 5 results texted to me. Reagan CTJ Cedar Ridge Round Rock Dripping Springs

I like Weiss's show but they haven't been very competitive this year against this competition so I think you have them a little high.

32 bands qualified for this area so looks like 6 will advance to state.

If a 30th band qualified for Area then 6 bands would advance to state...but because only 29 qualified only 5 will advance.

What qualifies a band to advance to area? I thought it was required that the band earn straight 1s...but I see some bands like Anderson (who earned a 2 from a single judge and 1s from the rest) as said to qualify for Area.

First through sixth place during prelims were separated by 6 points and then the dropoff between 6th and 7th was another 5.6 points. And then 7th through 13th were only separated by 3 points! Very tight group in the middle of the pack.

Looking forward to this event on Saturday! A very stacked field!

I'll give you one very simple but blunt answer. The key that makes a good marching band show is money. The more money a booster program can raise...and the more money a school district can give to its band programs, the more successful the marching band show. High quality marching shows have...a custom drill written to commissioned music...that tells a theme created by a creative director. Props cost money to design and build. Big programs have "techs" that give band directors extra sets of eyes and ears during practice. Successful marching bands travel more and further...which costs money. And the more students in the band, the cheaper all these costs become at the parent level. So a 1A band paying $300 a student will not get as much of marching band show as 6A band paying $300 a student. And because the 6A schools tend to be in wealthier neighborhoods, the 6A bands can get away with asking for $600, $800, or even $1000 a student. So yeah, money plays a huge role into how successful a marching band show is.

I think I like the Leander ISD shows a little more than you do but I get with where you are coming from. The same thing happens in DCI with the Blue Devils. Out of the last 8 world championships the Blue Devils have one, there's only one or two of them where I actually prefer the Blue Devils over whatever corp finished 2nd. And I'm not a BD hater, I love the Blue Devils from the 80's and 90's during my formative years of watching marching band/DCI. But the reason the Blue Devils have 13 year streak of top 2 finishes is that they consistently execute technically at an amazing level. But unfortunately amazing execution at a technical level doesn't always translate into exciting shows.

This makes sense to me. In fact, I saw this in action tonight at the finals. I watched a judge at the top of Kelly Reeves stadium when Reagan started their performance with 2:35 left during their setup time. The judge didn't say anything into his recorder during those final 2.5 minutes. When the countdown timer reached 10 seconds, he waited until the countdown reached 0:00 before picking up his recorder to give critique about the show.

Why would UIL change the rules for state finals? This doesn't make sense.

Westwood is playing McNeil on the Friday night of SASR. McNeil is performing at 5:45pm and Westwood is performing at 6:45pm at SASR. There's no way either of these two bands are going to be at that football game in Austin.

As soon as which performance is done? Area competition or State competition?

I wasn't expecting any bands to skip the Super Regional...since that contest will be valuable BOA specific feedback that they can build upon for Grand Nationals. State Marching contest has different criteria that bands are judge upon so the feedback may not be as valuable. Plus, if not for covid, 6A wouldn't be having a state championship this year so the bands were probably not planning for attending state anyways. And, as banddad said later in this thread, wrapping up state finals on Tuesday night and then shipping equipment across the country to Indianapolis can be a logistical challenge for the volunteers that do it. So I'm not so sure it's a slam dunk that all three bands are going to do state as well. We'll see.

Given how Reagan, CTJ, and Round Rock are going to both the Super Regionals and Grand Nationals, how likely is it that all three of these bands will choose to participate in the State marching contests as well? I ask because we all know these three bands are a lock for state. But it seems like participating in three marching band contests over the span of 8 days in two different states is pretty daunting. Would one or more of these schools choose to opt out of state in favor of the BOA competitions?

Can you imagine how much Texas bands would dominate Grand Nationals if the event was held in a Texas city like Dallas? It would leave the rest of the nation calling unfair and demanding they move it back to Indianapolis so that the other bands would have more of a chance.

Anderson's rise is due to a change in band directors 8 years ago. The new band director Ryan Zysk replaced Anderson's long time band director Ron Battani who I played for when I went to Anderson from 86-90. Battani's speciality was jazz so he always had some good jazz bands under his watch. Marching band, on the other hand, was a necessary evil to him and therefore Anderson didn't do as well on the football field with him. It sucked for me because I wanted us to go to state so bad. I watched all the state marching competitions at DKR every year I was in high school. I read the bio on the new band director and he was drum major for the Longhorn band when he was in college so he deeply cares about marching band. So I credit Anderson's rise to a marching band contender due to Mr Zysk.

Will UIL have web-streaming for the finals like they've done in the past?