bchorn

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?

I read orangebloods every day so while I enjoy a good football discussion I think it was wholly inappropriate to detract from the Lake Travis marching band accomplishments this season by bringing up Garrett Gilbert on this thread. Lets stick to marching bands on txbands.com please! Thanks!

For those who have purchased the Bands of America webcast, are you also able to replay the preliminary shows after the fact? I won't be able to watch the morning TX bands because i'll be at work so I could watch them later tonight before the Woodlands performs.

Yeah, this was my thought as well. Area D was tough enough in 5A without Cedar Park, Hendrickson and Lake Travis. Throw in the San Antonio north schools and now 5a Area D is going to be filthy tough. On the other end, this move will allow more 4A Area D bands to advance to state. Bottom line is that Area D 4A/5A is loaded with elite bands.

Again...why is this a big deal?

Why is this even a big deal? If Centennial is capable of playing the same book as the three time 5A state champion, that actually says a lot about the program attempting it. What about Cedar Park? Their book is from Carolina Crown 2010...you gonna make a big deal about that too?

When I watched Marcus during the prelims, I kept asking myself

I want to add my congratulations for the austin area bands as well. Back in my day (late 80's), it was always Crockett and whoever else happened to be really good that year. These days, Austin has so many top quality band programs that we are hanging with the "big boys". I want to add an additional shout out to my alma mater Anderson High. First they placed 17th last year in their first ever state marching contest appearance and now they finish 11th a BOA Super Regional contest that featured a lot of Texas' best bands. I'm so excited about where this band is going.

I have to agree with the others on this thread who felt underwhelmed by Marcus. While I thought they were definitely worthy of being in the finals, I didn't feel they deserved to win it all like they had many times before.

Excellent point. The point gap between 14th place (Anderson with 84.00) and 34th place (Seven Lakes with 77.05) was almost 7 points. 20 bands spread across is tight! As a comparison, 10 points separated Anderson from 1st place (LD Bell, 94.25) Once I get a copy of the recaps I can download/copy and paste into Excel, I'll be able to perform more analysis about how big the bubble was.

I'll be leaving Austin in about an hour for San Antonio to begin my two day adventure of preliminaries. I've never watched this many bands before in a two day period so I'm feeling a little overwhelmed. I think I'll be able to make it! Good thing the Saturday afternoon block looks to be the best.

I would love to see a top 10 shoot out between Indiana bands and Texas bands. The best 10 bands from each state competing head-to-head. THAT would be a competition!

I think the fairest solution would be to rotate the championships around the country. It's really hard for the bands on either coast to travel anywhere to the mid-west so only the elite bands like Tarpoon Springs (FL) Wando (SC) and the Atlanta schools make the attempt. So maybe rotate from West Coast, Texas, Indianapolis, and East coast every year. Of course, I know that BOA hosts Grand Nationals in Indianapolis for the same reasons DCI hosts the world championships their too: Logistics. It's very hard on both organizations to rotate the championships each year so having the championship in the same city each year reduces expenses and increases the stability for the event. This thread depresses me as much as a discussion of a legitimate playoff system for College Football since both seem highly unlikely to change anytime soon.

Just to clarify, reserved seating is only available for finals. Both days of preliminaries are general admission seating only.

To Bowie Freshman Mom's credit, 4th through 12th place were spread over five full points. And there was almost a full 6 point gap between 4th place and 2nd place. We are not going to see that kind of spread in San Antonio. BOA Atlanta was dominated by two bands, third place was a gimmie, while the rest of the bands battled for fourth place.

That was my thought. I figured one judge gave himself a lot of room at the start of the day and then forgot about CP as he was judging others the rest of the day. If the judge really didn't CP then the judge could have given the same placement during the finals which would have been to keep CP from advancing.

I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone mention this on txbands but Cedar Park's entire book is from Carolina Crown's 2010 show. That's impressive!