What is a Competition Marching Band?

A competing marching band is simply a way that bands get judged on how well they perform their show. There are several judges looking for different aspects of the performance - Music, marching, general effect, visual effect, etc. A perfect score is 100 points. Typically you see the best High School bands score in the low to mid 90's by the end of the season. Scores are much lower early in the season.

The Marching Band will go to competitions during the marching season to be judged. This is done with other bands as well, and awards are given out based on scores compared to other bands. All competing bands are part of the MCBA (Michigan Competing Bands Association) group. The way the competitions work is that all of the bands that compete (there are like 70) are divided up into 4 flights. Flights are based on school size (not band size.) The biggest schools are flight 1, and the smallest are flight 4. South Lyon is a flight 2 school (in 2012.. but this can change year to year.)

You only compete against bands in your flight, not all bands. There are and average of 15 schools in each flight. 12 bands from each flight will make it to the state show at Ford Field. So, not everyone gets to go - our goal is to get there. They take the average of your top 2 scores in October and the top 12 averages in each flight get to go to states.

Because we compete in flights, at any one competition there could be 4 first place trophies. One for each flight. You may hear scores from other flights that might be higher than ours (flight 1 typically are higher just because they are bigger) but we don't really care about those. We only care about flight 2 bands.

For state show they rotate the order of the flights that perform. In 2012 it is flight 4, then 3, then 2, then 1. You won't know the order of the bands in each flight until the week before the show.

You can see more information and details of the scores at the MCBA web site. www.themcba.org