Notes on Competition Scoring

Our Independence competition, the first WBA competition, was on Saturday. The band performed very well, improving (in the opinion of most people I spoke with) from the earlier week's performance at the Cupertino Tournament of Bands. The band and color guard, in particular, recognized that their improved focus and energy yielded a better performance. And they, after all, are the ones who matter!

If you followed the scoring, you will have noticed that our score at Independence was significantly lower than at the Cupertino Tournament of Bands. This is expected, as the Cupertino tournament is scored in a different way from Independence and the other tournaments. Cupertino is a separate competition, while the rest of our competitions are WBA (Western Bands Association) events. The WBA is a tougher scoring group than Cupertino, and frankly, more accurately assesses our performance. This drop is expected: the mighty Saratoga, ranked "Best In Galaxy" at Cupertino with a score of 94.7, dropped to 78.7 at Independence. Our own drop was similar.

• Scores for the Cupertino Tournament of Bands are posted at http://www.chs.fuhsd.org/cms/page_view?d=x&piid=&vpid=1255068480823&no_c... , with detailed scores at http://lghsmusic.net/files/cupertino_tob_scores_2009.pdf. Our overall score was 81.6. Our auxiliary scored third place with a score of 68.5.
• Scores for the Independence competition are in and posted at http://lghsmusic.net/files/wba_independence_101709.pdf for all bands, in detail.
• Our overall score at Independence placed us 5th out of 6th bands in the AAA category (80-100 members). For general effect, we scored 4th. In music, we scored 6th. Woof. However, our auxiliary (the guard) scored 2nd!
• In the categories of Percussion and Visual, we placed 5th, in line with our overall score.

Of course, we always want to do better--that is what the next competition is for. See you in Gilroy on 10/31!

FYI, We will be maintaining copies of all our scores on http://lghsmusic.net in the "Scores" category. We will be maintaining our scores there for your reference going forward.