6/19 - MidCal Champions Showcase

Blue Devils - 72.20 Santa Clara Vanguard - 70.60 Phantom Regiment - 66.95 Blue Knights - 65.40 Pacific Crest - 58.20 Mandarins - 55.75

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Blue Devils B - 55.95 Vanguard Cadets - 55.4 Golden Empire - 48.15 Blue Devils C - 37.10

Click Here for Recap

The drum corps season has started bright and early off to the west coast with June 19th's MidCal Champions Showcase, featuring six world class and four open class performances. There's always been the competitiveness in California between Blue Devils and Santa Clara Vanguard, and their open class child corps counterparts, Blue Devils B and Vanguard Cadets. And yet, last night, we witnessed this competitiveness last night, where Blue Devils took 1st in World Class at a current season high score of 72.200, with Santa Clara Vanguard right into 2nd at a 70.600. On the Open Class front, Blue Devils B took 1st with a 55.950, and Vanguard Cadets with a 55.400.

As both sides of the coasts compete to get better and more progressive, we'll know that Blue Devils and Santa Clara Vanguard will make a massive impression once they meet the eastern corps later this season. However, don't count out any of the other corps last night. Phantom Regiment and Blue Knights were right behind (in placement order respectively), close with 66.950 (PR) and 65.400 (BK), giving another close spread between corps. With the amount of intensity we've seen from the past years of these corps, we can highly expect that these two will divide out more between scores, yet progressively rise with their music packed shows. Pacific Crest comes in at 5th with a score of 58.200 on their show "The Catalyst". As always, we've seen leaps and falls between each year for them, however, they seem to changing in a new direction this year, which may hopefully be a great for the corps this season. Lastly, in 6th place, with little over a two point difference from Crest, came the show "Resurrection" from Mandarins. Again another corps with a leap and fall score spread, yet the percussion has improved much more, which will give a boost in their score, especially with how close Pacific Crest and Mandarins were in their music scores last night.

Moving onto the second portion of the review, came the introduction of the first Open Class corps competing for the 2015 season. As mentioned earlier in the article, Blue Devils B and Vanguard Cadets have always kept up a fight between each other for first place in Open Class. All scores between the two throughout the night were incredibly close, so we can expect a good clash between the two for captions and for first once again. Right for third came Golden Empire, a fairly new corps from the previous season. Although there isn't a fair call from them to talk about their previous experiences in drum corps, it'll be exciting to see how they'll improve this upcoming season, as they've already made a good start. For Blue Devils C, another corps from the Blue Devils family, came at a 37.100, giving a decent but "work in progress" first impression for the early season, Overall, it can be observed that this season will include a massively competitive fight between several other corps, as we've only seen a portion of all the rest of the corps.