An event that’s taken root at Rose Bowl Stadium in Pasadena since 2015, will find a “new” – yet familiar – home on the 2024 Drum Corps International Tour in a creative two-day format.
Due to a Rose Bowl Stadium scheduling conflict, 2024’s Corps at the Crest event, run by City of Industry, California’s Pacific Crest, will march into Mount San Antonio College’s Hilmer Lodge Stadium in Walnut. Two competitive events taking place Friday, June 28, and Saturday, June 29, will also replace a previously-scheduled event slated for Vista in San Diego County.
“This will be a homecoming of sorts for us this summer,” said Pacific Crest CEO Stuart Pompel. “Mt. SAC has been a longtime host of drum corps competitions and we’re excited to bring our Corps at the Crest event back to the Los Angeles area.”
The change in venue, however, created a challenge for Pacific Crest event organizers. The sheer size of Rose Bowl Stadium allowed the organization to develop deep inroads with many of the region’s high school bands, offering discounted and even free tickets to students as part of their annual outreach program, in addition to comfortably welcoming drum corps fans from across the region.
“In 2023 at Rose Bowl Stadium, we had nearly 10,000 people in the stands,” Pompel said. “4,000 of those were high school band students. With this new event, we want to make sure that we can continue to increase our investment into this important partnership.”
With Mt. SAC providing a little more than 5,000 seats on the concert side of the stadium, Pompel said that the best option for this year’s event was to split it into two nights. The Friday, June 28, edition will be open exclusively to group ticket holders, with Saturday’s event open to the general public. Southern California band directors are eligible for a free ticket to either of the nights.
“The student-focused edition on Friday will give us some fun opportunities to program the show accordingly, working with the performing corps to provide additional entertainment with ‘instant encores’ and the ability to get up-close-and-personal with students in the crowd,” Pompel said.
Both nights will feature the same lineups of competing corps, which will include Pacific Crest, all three Blue Devils corps (A, B, and C), Santa Clara Vanguard, Mandarins and a full complement of SoCal’s Open Class corps.
Tickets for each event are set to go on sale to the general public through the DCI Box Office beginning Monday, March 18 at noon ET, 9 a.m PT.