Gold Star Marching Band

[MankatoBison]

Minnesota screwed up their tremendous parade programs by allowing miniature field shows on the street. It now requires much more time to create these street field shows, thusly contributing to the drop in numbers. Your friends at Tri State Judging can take partial credit for destroying parade marching in MN, by allowing bands to stop for several minutes to perform.

There are several Southern Minnesota field show bands. They compete mostly in South Dakota and surrounding states. I directed band and remember it well.

Heck yeah I've seen this front and center. I prefer the mini field shows fwiw, but I can only speak for the 4-5 bands who I know the directors from. In the 90's and early 2000's, most marching bands were REQUIRED participation (which is why we saw so many 200+ person bands, ours included). I would venture to say at least half of the MBs had required participation. Then in the mid 2000's virtually 100% of the bands dropped it as a requirement in the music department and numbers plummeted, big time.

Less marchers allowed for more maneuvering on the street, which is great, but when you have only 40 marchers, it becomes pretty pathetic, pretty quickly lol. Given the option, I'd rather have 200 marchers doing a show with only 5-10 sets of drill compared to what we are left with now, thats for sure

[CaBisonFan]

Heck yeah I've seen this front and center. I prefer the mini field shows fwiw, but I can only speak for the 4-5 bands who I know the directors from. In the 90's and early 2000's, most marching bands were REQUIRED participation (which is why we saw so many 200+ person bands, ours included). I would venture to say at least half of the MBs had required participation. Then in the mid 2000's virtually 100% of the bands dropped it as a requirement in the music department and numbers plummeted, big time.

Less marchers allowed for more maneuvering on the street, which is great, but when you have only 40 marchers, it becomes pretty pathetic, pretty quickly lol. Given the option, I'd rather have 200 marchers doing a show with only 5-10 sets of drill compared to what we are left with now, thats for sure

The numbers plummeted big time because of the amount of time required to create and perfect a miniature field show for the street. Thusly... the requirement was dropped so that the bottom didn't drop out of the entire band program. Seeing how this involved significant spring time commitment and also the month of June... it put too much pressure on the moderately committed band member. Not sure of the order of events... but a crappy sounding field show wasn't very appealing. California has a requirement that there is to be no stopping during a parade... and the student involvement is through the roof. The pain matches the gain... which is the key to any type of program.

https://youtu.be/xst0QKtiMwY