If there's one place the Boston Crusaders feel at home, outside of Boston of course, it's Florida. Many of the Crusaders' winter camps take place there due to the fact a large contingent of their membership hails from the Sunshine State. The crowd at Camping World Stadium in Orlando, FL, showed up in support Sunday to cheer the Crusaders onto a second-place finish for the night.

In an interview with Jeff Griffith, a contributor on DCI's Communications team, the Crusaders' drum major Kait Oresky said, "Walking out here, you see that crowd, you hear them screaming for you—and they're here for you. I think that got everyone going immediately tonight."

After a lengthy wait that included being told to look online for scores while at the venue, DCI's website crashing, and an abundance of impatient complaints on a number of drum corps fan forums/social media outlets, Boston Crusaders came out not on top but in a flat-out tie for second with the 2017 bronze medalist, Carolina Crown.

The Deets

Bluecoats topped the two in overall score with a gap of 1.650 but not without giving up the color guard and percussion sub-captions to the Boston corps. 

That's right. Boston Crusaders earned first in color guard with a score of 16.600, 0.30 higher than the next best, Bluecoats. In percussion, the same occurred, only with a gap of 0.20 however.

In the 2017 DCI World Championships, Boston Crusaders and Carolina Crown were separated by 3.6125 points. At their first show in 2018, the DCI Tour Premiere on June 21, the two were still 2.700 away from one another. 

Things really started to heat up when the two groups performed together again on July 1 in Lawrence, MA. This time, the gap was only 1.100 and Boston chipped away at a few sub-captions with a lead over Crown in visual proficiency and color guard.

The gap widened the following day in Lynn, MA to 1.250; even more in Clifton, NJ last Thursday to 1.400 and finally swung shut to just a 0.45-point difference the night before Orlando at CrownBEAT.