As any drum corps season nears its end, the events — by nature — get bigger. The stakes get higher. The lights get brighter.
In turn, lineups get longer, as well. With a longer lineup comes a longer list of final scores at the end of the night. And, of course, any drum corps final score is the product of several more granular scores.
Learn more about how to read a scoring recap in the August issue of DCI Magazine
By now, you’ve done the math. On a scoring recap at the DCI World Championships, there are a lot of numbers — 2,356 to be exact, for example, at the 2024 DCI World Championship Prelims.
Here are five of those numbers you might have missed during 2024 DCI World Championship events.
1. The Fred Sanford Award race was a nail-biter.
When Santa Clara Vanguard took home the Fred Sanford Award for Best Percussion Performance — for the sixth time in 10 years — it did so by the skin of its teeth.
At the DCI World Championships, caption awards are determined by the average of a corps’ scores in applicable captions across all three championship performances. When the Prelims were in the books, Boston Crusaders held the top percussion marks with a caption score of 19.6. Santa Clara Vanguard was actually in third, scoring 19.4, behind Bluecoats’ 19.55.
A first-place Semifinals finish for Santa Clara, though, made things interesting. Vanguard (19.75) outscored Boston Crusaders (19.65) by one tenth on the second night of championship competition. Even still, though, the New England corps held the lead on an average of both nights, heading into Finals.
But in the Finals, Vanguard left no doubt. SCV’s percussion caption outscored the field by 0.15 points, sliding into first on the average-scoring scale.
When all was said and done, Vanguard’s three-night-average percussion score (19.533) was a razor thin advantage of just 0.05 ahead of Boston’s 19.483.
Read more about 2024’s caption award winners
2. The Open Class champion was nearly Top 12 — in one caption.
At any DCI World Championship event, corps’ rankings from caption-to-caption are sometimes quite volatile.
Often, a corps will have a standout caption that sits as a statistical outlier on its list of final tallies. In an example which many drum corps may have in the front of their minds, the eighth-place Cavaliers ranked all the way up in first in percussion at last year’s DCI World Championships.
It’s easy to miss this kind of outlier, though, in the “middle-of-the-pack” — in the sea of thousands of numbers.
When drum corps fans look back at that sea — specifically, the bevy of scores from the 2024 DCI World Championship Semifinals — they may want to check out the Visual Proficiency caption. Spartans, an Open Class corps often known for its visual prowess — and 2024’s Open Class gold medalist — ranked a stunning 13th in the caption.
However, that’s not the highest an Open Class corps has ever ranked in any caption at the DCI World Championship Semifinals; Blue Devils B earned an impressive 12th place in percussion in 2016.
3. A pair of color guards soared in Semifinals.
For Pacific Crest, 2024 set multiple records. The southern California corps earned its all-time highest placement, 13th, and final score, 86.350. Those weren’t its only scoring feats, though.
While a Top 12 finalist position is still yet to be attained by Pacific Crest, the corps’ color guard went out in the Top 10, posting a 10th-place ranking in the color guard caption. In doing so, Pacific Crest became the first non-finalist to score in the Top 10 of any caption in Semifinals since Colts’ color guard ranked 10th in 2016 despite a 14th-place finish overall.
On the same night, Blue Stars — which landed in eighth at all three nights of the DCI World Championships — scored an impressive fifth in color guard. The next night in Finals, the corps’ guard took sixth.
4. White Sabers posted World Class music scores.
While DCI All-Age Class competitors compete for awards and placements in three separate classes — World, Open and A — their scores are given on a shared All-Age scale.
This fact alone makes White Sabers’ music caption scores all the more impressive.
White Sabers, a corps competing in the DCI All-Age Open classification, earned second overall in its division, scoring 86.775 to Open Class Champion Cincinnati Tradition’s 87.475.
However, the New York corps earned the top All-Age Open scores in Brass, and Total Music. Its tallies weren’t just good for first in Open competition; they were good for fourth among all All-Age corps, ahead of two World Class competitors. Cincinnati Tradition accomplished the same feat, earning the fifth-best overall Total Music score.
5. None of the Top 11 corps earned the same percussion placement as its overall placement.
Since overall scores are an aggregation of all caption scores, it’s common to see a corps’ placement in a given caption be close — or exactly the same — as its overall ranking. For example, of the 12 finalists, 11 had the same ranking in General Effect as their overall placement.
Other captions, such as Visual Proficiency, Brass, and Color Guard, saw closer to half of the Top 12 corps’ caption placements match their ranking.
In percussion, though, scores were about as jumbled as could be. Madison Scouts were the only finalist whose percussion placement was the same as its overall order of finish in 12th.
As such, several corps “rose above their station,” as it were, in the percussion caption. The Cavaliers (10th overall) took 7th. Troopers (9th) took eighth. Santa Clara Vanguard (6th) took 1st.