What Competition is all About

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Competition has been about doing one’s best with what one has. Many have perverted that into creating enemies and bad-blood rivalries. Having a friendly cross-town rival is just fine, if you can congratulate the other fr a job well done when they walk away with the trophy. In today’s America, we see athletic coaches fired for not winning “enough.” We …

Point Spreads and What They Mean

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Currently, military drill competition scores are not associated with a standard so the point spreads (the amount of numbers between scores given to teams) do not have any meaning- but they should. I’ll explain. Current scoring methods look like this (or are very similar): several categories with a score range of 1 – 10. The total points for that score …

How to Prepare for a Competition

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Males Two or 3 days prior to a competition, get fresh haircut. If you have sensitive skin/acne, make sure your shaving schedule ensures you shave the morning of the competition always have a styptic* at hand when shaving). *Styptics are a specific type of antihemorrhagic agent that work by contracting tissue to seal injured blood vessels. Styptic pencils contain astringents. …

Ask DrillMaster- Competing in Rounds

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Question: I was watching YouTube and I noticed some people competed in two different rounds at the same competition, but my question is that would a competitor be able to use one sequence for one round and use a whole other sequence for the other round? Or do they have to have the same sequence? Answer: Thanks for the question! …

What is “Audience Engagement”?

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What is it that makes a routine grab the audience by the eyeballs and yell at them, “Don’t miss this or you’ll regret it!” Audience engagement, my friends, audience engagement. What is it and how do you get some? Read on: You can look up the term “audience engagement” and get all kinds of results for performing arts groups (I’m …

Improvisation or What We Call, “Monkey Drill”

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In the military drill world improvisation is called “Monkey Drill.” If you ask any Driller who has competed more than once they will probably admit that one of their routines was “Monkeyed,” meaning that they made it up on the spot as they were performing. Angel Solis just finished the Texas Drill Competition (TXDC) and won with a Monkeyed routine. …

Competing with “the Best of the Best of the Best”

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There is no way anyone can train an individual or group of individuals to be the “best of the best of the best” and it doesn’t matter what word you use instead of “best.” What does that even mean, anyway?  “He’s really excited and has no clue why we’re here.” Says Will Smith’s character in the original Men in Black …

The Drill Meet

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What is a Drill Meet? In America, the drill meet, after putting in hours of hard work designing, choreographing, practicing, rewriting and practicing some more, is a competition for drill teams, Drillers and color teams (NOTE: military-based: “color team;” music-based: “color guard“). The organizations that compete are each services’ Jr., high school, and Sr., college, Reserve Officer Training Corps, Army …

Military Drill Judging

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For decades the only requirement to be qualified to judge a military drill competition was graduation from a service’s Basic Training. That’s it. You’re now able to rank and rate and assign a score to what you see on the competitive field. And what’s better is if you are a Drill/Training Instructor or on an honor guard. Somehow, you are …

Licensing Music for Performances

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No matter what kind of performance you do, if it is to music and someone else wrote it, you need a license if you want to record and/or broadcast the performance. So, what is a Driller to do? This is where Copycat Licensing comes in. They will take care of everything for you, but you need to give them time! …