Parents and students,
Congratulations to everyone on a great weekend at the Nease show. We accomplished all of our goals and have put ourselves in a great position for State. I have received a lot of questions about how things worked at the competition Saturday and what does block really mean. So I will do my best to explain.
Question #1; How could Fleming Island win so many best in Finals awards and finish 3rd?
In Finals, they earned best Visual, Drum Major, Percussion and Guard. There are only 3 captions that count towards the overall score, Music, General Effect and Visual. There are 6 judges that evaluate those captions and their scores are added together to make up the final score. The drum major, percussion and guard scores are more of a courtesy to those individual sections and do not reflect in the final Full Ensemble score. With that said, I want to take a moment and give our color guard a huge congratulations. They lifted their score from a 72 last week at Showcase to an 86 this week at Nease. Awesome job.
So, we won best music, Santa Fe won best GE and Fleming won best visual. When you add all of that together, you get the results that happened on Saturday.
Question #2: What does block mean and why do we make such a big deal out of it?
This one is a little more complicated to explain, but here it goes. Block has everything to do with the order in which we perform at State Semi-Finals on November 17th. The way the Florida Band Tournament works is this....
Bands can send in their registrations for State at anytime throughout the Spring, Summer or Fall and assign the band a seeding number based on the order in which they receive the registration and full payment. Your seeding number determines the order of performance at State prelims with early entries going last and late entries going first. However, the FMBC collects any registrations sent in before April 1st and puts all of those into a pot. On April 2nd, any bands that sent in their stuff before April 1st are randomly drawn out of the hat and given a seeding number, this year, our number is #18. This year, 55 bands sent in their registrations before April 1st, so I am very pleased with being drawn #18. Our seeding number has NO reflection on a bands class size (1A, 2A, etc) nor does it have any reflection on their ability(This is not college football).
So, this determines how the schedule is lined up for prelims. Is this fair? Depends on your point of view.
Anyway, the FMBC then sets a high score for each each week of the season called Block Score. If you achieve a block score at a show, you get to go to the end of the line for the State Prelims Schedule. All bands that block in a particular class are then placed in the order of the seedings.
By us blocking on Saturday, we moved from having to go 7th or 8th from last at Prelims to getting to go second from the end. The advantage to going later is that the judges get to see everyone else and then if we do our job correctly, they can rank us very accurately. At State, there will be 17 bands in our class alone.
I hope this explanation helps.
We are in the midst of two fund raisers right now, Christmas wreaths and Dominos Pizza Cards. Both are going out to the students today.
This week is a much easier week for us
Monday: Full Band 3:00 to 5:00 PM
Tuesday: Horns 3 - 5 PM Pit/Battery/Guard 5:30 - 8:30 PM
Thursday: Full Band 5:30 - 8:30 PM
Friday: Full Band 1:00 - 5:00 PM (No school)
Saturday: FBA District Festival at Columbia HS, itinerary attached
The ACT is being given here at GHS on Saturday morning, we are not starting until the ACT is over.
Have a good week,
Bill
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