10 competitive notes from 10 days of #DCI2022

The recent July 4th holiday — a day with zero official DCI Tour events — marked the 11th day since the outset of the 2022 DCI Summer Tour, DCI’s celebration of its 50th anniversary, and the first competitive drum corps season since 2019. As July heads into full swing, the beginning of a new week provides a prime opportunity to check in on how things are shaping up around the DCI Tour map.

As is often the case early on in a drum corps season, corps have spent the early days of the summer performing and competing with one another in largely-geographic pockets, so there's not quite enough data to make sweeping conclusions about the full competitive scope of #DCI2022. 

But even so, there’s been plenty of intrigue embedded within the first few scoring recaps in nearly three years.

Here are 10 key competitive notes from the first 10 days of the 2022 DCI Tour:

 

1. Arguably one of the most talked-about competitive moments of the Summer Tour to date, Carolina Crown came out of the gates with back-to-back victories in its first return to the DCI stage since 2019, including a head-to-head win over 2019 silver-medalist Bluecoats. Carolina Crown’s first-place finish in Kent, Ohio (July 2) marked its first head-to-head defeat of Bluecoats since 2017’s DCI World Championships Semifinals, ending a streak of 32 consecutive head-to-head losses to the Canton, Ohio corps. The total gap between the two, though, was razor-thin, with Crown holding an advantage of just 0.45 points. The majority of that lead — 0.3 points — came from the General Effect caption, while Bluecoats’ visual and percussion scores came out on top.

2. Blue Devils enter the month of July with the most first-place finishes of any corps on the DCI Tour, having earned three victories in as many competitive appearances. The 2019 world champions’ average margin of victory over nearby perennial-top-finisher Santa Clara Vanguard is just shy of 1.5 points. 2022’s opening weekend marks the first time the Concord corps won its first three DCI Tour events by more than a point apiece since 2016. That being said, at the two Bay Area corps’ most recent meeting, July 2 in Tempe, Arizona, the Santa Clara corps took top marks in percussion, and finished within three tenths of a point in both the visual and music captions.

3. In taking home top marks at the DCI Tour Premiere in Detroit, Michigan (June 28), Bluecoats won the corps’ fifth “Tour Premiere” event in a row, dating back to the beginning of 2016. Its margin-of-victory at 2022’s event, 2.25 points, was the largest of all five aforementioned victories by a significant margin; prior to 2022, Bluecoats’ largest Tour Premiere victory margin was 1.35. The Detroit event’s closest finisher behind Bluecoats, Boston Crusaders, scored 1.1 points behind the Canton, Ohio corps at the same event in 2019.

 

4. Boston Crusaders had a resounding head-to-head victory of its own; at the same Detroit event, the Boston corps defeated The Cavaliers — a corps that had finished ahead of the Crusaders in 2019 — by a solid margin of 1.85. That tally marks Boston Crusaders’ largest margin of victory against the Rosemont corps since mid-July 2019.

5. Fresh off of a memorable non-competitive 2021 summer, Phantom Regiment turned heads out of the gate, defeating Blue Stars head-to-head for the first (June 28 in Detroit) and second (July 1 in Muncie, Indiana) times since July 7, 2018, by 0.6 and 0.35 points respectively. In Muncie, Blue Stars defeated Phantom Regiment in general effect and finished just 0.1 points behind the Rockford, Illinois corps in visual scoring, but Regiment’s strong music scores — buoyed by a notable margin in percussion — made the difference.

6. In the season’s earliest events out in southern California, Mandarins made a little bit of history; its gap of 4.2 points behind Santa Clara Vanguard, June 26 in San Bernardino, marks the closest the two corps have ever finished in head-to-head scoring. In 2019, the slimmest margin between the two was 4.5.

 

7. At both corps’ second event of the 2022 DCI Tour, July 3 in Cedarburg, Wisconsin, Colt Cadets earned the corps’ first head-to-head victory over River City Rhythm since July 16, 2016. The two were separated by just a tenth of a point overall; Colt Cadets held decent-sized advantages in both general effect and visual captions, but River City Rhythm owned a strong lead in music.

8. At its early-season home show in Tempe, Arizona, The Academy earned its closest score relative to Blue Knights since July 14, 2018, finishing just 3.2 points behind the Denver corps. Less than a point separated the two corps in both the general effect and visual captions.

9. At Colts’ debut event of the 2022 season — July 1 in Muncie — the Dubuque, Iowa corps scored within less than a point of Crossmen, which has been a finalist in each of the last six competitive season. The total gap between the two, 0.85 points, marks the closest Colts and Crossmen have scored to one another since 2015’s DCI World Championship Semifinals. At that event, the two finished on either side of the Top 12 finalist cutoff, with Crossmen in 12th, Colts in 14th and Troopers slotted closely in between.

10. The defending Open Class champions, Spartans, posted comparable season-opening scores to those from their 2019 championship season, breaking 60 points in just the corps’ second event of the year, July 3 in Lynn, Massachusetts. 

View the 2022 DCI Tour Schedule

Upcoming Events

Tuesday, July 5
Fresno, CA • Watch Live on FloMarching 

Wednesday, July 6
Dover, DE
Ankeny, IA
Mason, OH

Thursday, July 7
Evansville, IN

Friday, July 8
Sacramento, CA
Camas, WA
Dubuque, IA

Saturday, July 9
Lexington, SC • Watch Live on FloMarching
Renton, WA
DeKalb, IL • Watch Live on FloMarching

Sunday, July 10
Stanford, CA • Watch Live on FloMarching 
Statesboro, GA • Watch Live on FloMarching
La Crosse, WI