UIL Region Scoring Explanation and Results Spreadsheet
This past Saturday, October 8th, marked the beginning of official UIL Marching Band competition in the state of Texas, and there are many moving parts that can be hard to keep track of. This article will guide you through how the UIL judging system works at the first of three levels: Region. Follow along with the results as they come in by going to this spreadsheet!
Starting at the Region level, this contest only has one round of performances, and the bands are NOT competing against each other; they are only given a rating on a scale from 1 to 5 (1 - Superior, 2 - Excellent, 3 - Average, 4 - Below Average, 5 - Poor). Every Region contest has three judges that give every band a rating based on both music and visual performance, and they are averaged together for an overall rating, so a 1 1 2 would reward the band a Superior rating, but a 1 2 2 would reward the band an Excellent rating. It is not always done by the average, however. UIL has implemented an outlier rule where if one judge is far off from the other two, their score is not factored in. This rule comes into effect if a band receives the rating 1 1 3 from judges and the overall rating remains a 1 even though the average is closer to 2. Every band that receives a Superior rating gets to advance to their Area Marching Contest with a few exceptions.
The first exception is for Class 1A. Since there are so few competitive marching bands from schools this size in Texas (in UIL, Class 1A schools have a 9-12 enrollment of under 105), they skip the Area process, and on State years, every Class A band who receives a 1 goes on to the State Marching Contest.
The other exception is “Non-Varsity” bands, which primarily consist of JV bands (like Coppell and Round Rock) or Junior High campuses (like the six 9-10 only campuses in Plano ISD), but every program has the option to sign themselves up as Non-Varsity for competition.
Lastly, there are penalty scores in UIL, which can be ruthless at the Region level. For example, according to UIL’s rules, a show cannot surpass eight minutes in length. If you do surpass that amount of time, you are subject to a penalty that drops your ranking by one. So if a band earns a 1 overall from the judges, they are dropped to an overall ranking of 2, disqualifying them from further competition. There are other ways to get disqualified, such as marching academically ineligible members, which is a rule in all UIL-sanctioned events as they not only run marching band but virtually every sport and academic competition as well in the State of Texas.
That’s the gist of the craziness that is the UIL Region competition and why it’s so important in Texas. What happens after a band qualifies for Area is very different from what they do at Region, but we will cover that in an article next week.
Aaron Blackley is one of the original contributors for General Effect Media. Despite being young and fresh out of college, he has a vast knowledge and passion for the marching arts and has worked alongside the likes of HornRank as a ranker and moderator as well as the TxBands.com liveblog team since summer 2021. He can be found on Twitter as @GEMAaronB.