A Brief BOA Breakdown

Let's talk numbers, because navigating trip sheets wasn't hard enough already.

BOA competition starts this week for just under 100 high school bands around the US. For thousands of freshman (and occasionally younger) students making their competitive debut, there are thousands of first-time band parents with tens of thousands of questions. 

What the heck is an ordinal? Where do penalties come from? What are all those old guys in green t-shirts whispering about? Why do the pretzels in America’s Center taste like military-grade cardboard? 

To the best of my ability, the answers to these (and more) will be somewhere within this article. 

Last year’s Cedar Falls regional, where the author’s little brother totally destroyed the competition.

Bands of America, fondly known to high schoolers, graduates, and supportive parents across the country as BOA, hosts competitions nationwide every weekend from mid-September to early November. A notable chunk of these band enthusiasts and participants are also involved with drum corps (summer band, but really intense) and indoor (winter band, but really inside). This means a practically never-ending season of performing arts for hordes of high schoolers nationwide. There are worse hobbies. For groups pushing into the upper echelons of competition, the difference between being just another band and being a Bands of America Regional/Super Regional/Grand National Finalist comes down to little numbers on a white PDF. These little numbers are the scores. The placements (1st, 2nd, and so on) are called ordinals, or just placements. When you have an activity that takes place across a continent, variations in semantics will occur. I won’t overwhelm with mathematics in this particular article, but each score is an achievement out of a total maximum number (20) for each specific category. 

The Music Performance scores from the aforementioned Cedar Falls regional.

There are three categories that are decidedly not created equal: Music Performance, Visual Performance, and General Effect. There’s a reason why we aren’t called “Visual Performance Media”. General Effect is the make-or-break of the game. It includes both the ensemble music and visual effect - more on this later. Between Music and Visual, 60% of the score comes from the music category, while visual weighs in at only 40%. General Effect counts for 60% of the total score, while the two performance categories mentioned previously only total 40%. 

Each specific column is dedicated to one portion of the total score, and is ruled over by an almighty judge. There’s a guy down on the field who specifically assesses the way that individual performers sound, and a guy up in the press box or the stands who listens to the ensemble as a whole. These two guys’ little numbers get averaged together. This is a group’s Music Performance score. The same goes for Visual Performance, with a field judge examining how well individual members of the ensemble march, and his little numbers get averaged in with the press box judge checking how well the pictures look from above. If your kid’s feet are in time and the little squiggles they all make together look good enough, you expect a decent score in the Visual Performance ordinals. These judges are professionals with decades of experience in the marching arts- they probably aren’t wrong about it. Of course, people on the internet will disagree. Welcome to Marching Band! In the General Effect category, these same two categories are analyzed by different judges, who are looking not only at achievement, but also cohesiveness and how well the concept is executed. On a surface level, GE is about how the show feels. It’s the reason why some bands will pay designers upwards of $30k or more for a single show. It’s one thing to play well - it’s another to create an immersive experience. This is all incredibly confusing and subjective, which is why I am very thankful that I’m not the one who decides on it. 

The bands that place in the top 12 (or 14, for Super Regionals) during prelims will move onto finals for a chance to uphold their scores for a second time, or hopefully improve. If there are more than a certain threshold (64 as of this year) bands at a Super Regional, there are two panels of judges, with a mix-match of judges from those two panels judging for finals. With a two-panel system, the top 5 bands of each panel advance, plus the next 4 highest scoring groups regardless of panel. The panel alternates every block, or group of 14 bands that perform back-to-back. Each group's panel is entirely the luck of the draw - your band may end up sandwiched between two past Grand National Champions. 

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If you’re still with me, we’ve established what the judges are doing as they run around down there, what they’re looking at, and how that factors into a band’s overall score. Pretty simple, right? But wait…what’s that final box right before Total? Like sports, marching band has penalties- though they’re relatively rare, and the effect on the band’s overall score can be pretty negligible. BOA penalizes bands for matters that are primarily related to student safety and adherence to schedule- a penalty of 0.1 results from a band being slightly under or over performance time, taking too long to exit the field, or violating boundaries. The penalties for situations such as taking too long to exit the field are evaluated on a case-by-case basis, with the safety of the performers being more important. Bands that are determined to not be making an effort to exit in a timely manner are subject to penalty, but a student carrying two instruments, a shotgun mic, and a rifle, who happens to step out of bounds 3 seconds past the clock, won’t incur any penalties for the band. Larger offenses, such as adults contributing to the performance or delay of contest, count for 0.5 points. More serious violations that could result in disqualification are at the discretion of the Contest Director. As mentioned previously, these penalties are fairly rare, and band staffs tend to be incredibly scrupulous about ensuring that guidelines are met. A penalty can mean the difference between semifinals and sleeping in Saturday morning for a band that typically scores within the top 30-40 of groups at Grand Nationals. If you’re Tarpon Springs at BOA Orlando in 2021, you can incur a penalty and still win the competition by almost 5 points. 

By some metrics, a “good” show is one that scores as close to the maximum as possible, incurs no penalties, and earns the school a hefty shelf full of hardware by the end of the season. But there are over 600 bands registered for at least one BOA event this season. Most of these bands will not score a 19.500 in Individual Music Performance or take home Kevin the Eagle. Are these still good shows? 

On the morning of Sunday, November 13th, there will be one Grand National Champion and 606 other bands. These bands have all been evaluated on the same sheets. They all have a total score that isn’t quite 100.00. These scores will be printed on posters, immortalized in high school yearbooks, and edited into meme templates. There will be a school in Mid-Missouri celebrating their historic 65.750, and a school deep in the heart of Texas, Indiana, and/or Oklahoma disappointed over a 92.500. People across the country will dispute those numbers on the Internet, but they won’t change. The notion of a “good” show is entirely relative- the numerical aspect is only one facet of the greater gem that is high school marching band. It’s my hope that those little rows of numbers make a bit more sense now.

Hattie Bartlett is an experienced marching arts content creator making her writing debut with GEM. As a former member of the color guard, she has traveled across the country covering events with WGI and Box5, as well as informally commentating via HornRank. Hattie is currently on staff at the University of Missouri as a field photographer and communications intern. She can be found on Twitter, Instagram, and Tiktok as @ilikeguard.