Grand Champs!!! Again!!!

Sorry I haven't been faithfully updating here like I vowed I would.  We've competed once more since I last posted.  On Saturday, January 21 we participated in Johnston High School's "Showzam" invitational.

Aside: I don't know why it's necessary to give your competition a fancy name.  Some of the ones we've attended or will attend this year are:

• Raise the Roof
• Showzam
• Starstruck
• Supernova
• Spectacular

I guess it's a way to try to differentiate your competition from others, but as a participant or attendee it makes no difference at all in my opinion of your event.  I won't return or not return because you had or didn't have a cool name for your competition.  I'll make that decision based on how well you ran it and the quality of groups you're able to convince to come to your school.  Besides, nobody uses the names anyway.  If somebody asks me, "Where did you compete this weekend?" My reply will not be, "At SHOWZAM!!!"  It will simply be, "At Johnston." /endrant

It was a very close competition between us and Ankeny just as I suspected it would be.  Let me start by saying this...I really like Ankeny's directors, Lester Miller and Jim Cacciatore.  They're solid likeable guys who do great things with the kids over there.  Even though the style of show we produce is very different, I can see a lot of similarities between their program and ours.  The directors and kids seem to get along, but still have that student-teacher respect for one another.  They're very disciplined in their approach to preparing their show.  They obviously have great attention to detail and are very professional.

The daytime results were as follows:

Open Class
 1st - Urbandale "Studio 2012"
2nd - Ankeny "Visual Adrenaline"
3rd - Ankeny "Perpetual Motion"
4th - Lincoln East "Express"
5th - Indianola "Side One"

Prep Class
1st - Ankeny "Perpetual Motion"
2nd - Urbandale "Vitality"

Finalists (Top 6 scorers regardless of class)
1st - Urbandale "Studio 2012"
2nd - Ankeny "Visual Adrenaline"
3rd - Ankeny "Perpetual Motion"
4th - Urbandale "Vitality"
5th - Lincoln East "Express"
6th - Indianola "Side One"

So yeah...Ankeny and Urbandale took the top 4 spots in the daytime.  Studio 2012 also received the award for Best Band.  This is significant because of this.  Studio beat Visual Adrenaline by 1.5 points in the daytime. Our band outscored theirs by 4 points.  So our choir actually lost to Ankeny by 2.5 points, but our band was the difference between victory and defeat.

After the finals the order stayed the same except Vitality and Lincoln East swapped spots.  Studio was awarded Best Vocals and Visual Adrenaline was awarded Best Choreography.  The point difference in finals was 8.5 points due to the addition of 4 more judges.  At night Studio's band was 12 points ahead of Ankeny's.  So once again our stellar band was the difference between victory and defeat.  This makes me especially proud since I accompany the show choir on piano and am primarily responsible for taking care of the backup combo.

Next up on our schedule we host our own competition on February 10 and 11.  It's a lot of work, but very important to the success of our program.

I never know how to end these posts, so I'll just leave it at.......