Weekend Recap: DCI Midwestern Champs & Drums Along The Rockies
Weekend Recap: DCI Midwestern Champs & Drums Along The Rockies
Twenty-eight of DCI's greatest drum and bugle corps competed this weekend LIVE on FloMarching. Here's the quick and dirty from the results.
After two huge days of competition in Colorado and Missouri, the Drum Corps International summer tour has officially entered "regional season." Along with that comes "Texas tour," "swamp tour," and then the final stretch into the 2018 DCI World Championships will be here before you know it!
Results from the Drums Along The Rockies and DCI Midwestern Championships set up the seeding and randomly drawn lineup for the massive Southwestern Championships show coming up this weekend in San Antonio.
Check out the full lineup for this weekend's DCI Southwestern Championship here.
Drums Along The Rockies
A small but mighty lineup took over Mile High Stadium on Saturday night. Santa Clara Vanguard and Blue Knights headlined the event, with Vanguard holding a commanding lead over the rest of the corps in Denver.
Each of the corps were relatively out of reach from each other and siloed off, as far as scores were concerned.
SCV earned an 86.650, slowing down its trajectory from what it was seeing earlier along the summer tour. Either way, the number was good enough to place them in the top-three groups across the two shows from the weekend. Vanguard will perform second to last at this Saturday's DCI Southwestern Championships following Bluecoats and right before its California neighbors, the Blue Devils.
One of the most surprising results to come from Denver was The Academy topping Blue Knights in the visual caption. The corps beat BK in visual analysis and color guard, two sub-captions in which Blue Knights usually have a strong hold.
See the full results from the 2018 Drums Along The Rockies.
DCI Midwestern Championships
If you tuned in to The Dome At America's Center in St. Louis on Sunday, you know just how crazy this season can be. Right out of the gates, the competition was unpredictable and the entertainment level was high.
The show kicked off with three very strong performances from DCI's Open Class corps: Colt Cadets, Legends, and Shadow. Legends came out on top of all sub-captions except for visual analysis and percussion. The corps' overall score ended up at a 61.425. The corps was at a 60.55 at the same point (July 15) in 2017.
In the second block of performances, we saw an all-out brawl between the middle tier of DCI. From Phantom Regiment to the Colts, the results could have landed anywhere. Colts ended up just a hair behind Madison Scouts, a corps that has recently found themselves fighting to keep in the conversation for the 2018 DCI finals.
Ahead of Scouts, Spirit of Atlanta opened up a small gap of nearly two points, leaving the corps just within a point trailing behind Crossmen, a fairly surprising result considering its ambitious goal toward a single-digit placement at DCI finals.
Mandarins, Phantom Regiment, and Blue Stars make up the next tier of corps. These are the corps that are looking for spots in the 8-12 range after all is said and done after DCI finals. Only 1.100 points separated Mandarins and Blue Stars, with Phantom Regiment sandwiched in the middle. The most surprising results have to be Mandarins guard pulling out a sixth-place run in the dome putting them ahead of the two, as well as The Cadets who placed sixth overall.
In the top echelon of World Class corps, the Blue Devils came out on top in the first meeting of 10 of last year's top 12 corps. This ended Bluecoats' hot streak of winning every show, but now each corps at the top has lost at least one show. BD and Coats were separated by 0.225, with a 1.200 gap between Bluecoats and Carolina Crown in third. The Cavaliers and Boston Crusaders finished in fourth and fifth, respectively, but were very much within reach of the top three.
As the DCI summer tour heads to more regionals and we get more opportunities to see each of these corps take on one another head-to-head, things can only get more interesting from here. Tune in this weekend to watch the 2018 DCI Southwestern Championship in San Antonio, starting at 12:15 PM CT with "Taking the Field."