Common Goals? And a Rant...

Things are beginning to fall in place. After another ambitious weekend we have made progress. At this point progress is very important and it goes a long way towards our goal. At the end of rehearsal on Sunday everyone left with a very good sense of accomplishment. We made some very good changes to the show this weekend. Not all of them are smooth and seamless just yet, but with reps and cleaning they will be.

I did have some issues with certain people this weekend, but because of the pace of rehearsal and the achievement I decided to bite my tongue and not make an issue out of it. Well now it’s Monday, this is my personal Blog and I can write whatever I want, so here goes. I am fed up with laziness. For a section with so much talent that can achieve at such a high level, why do we have to be so damn lazy? We are getting great results despite the apparent lack of motivation. If we were more motivated, driven, and goal oriented I think we could achieve so much more. We are clearly an outstanding section, but we will have not taken the next step. We have all of the tools to take that step, we just lack the motivation as a group.

Our achievement is all a credit of our great talent at this point. Each of us gets bitchy at some point at individual members of the section because we are not on the same page from an approach standpoint. Each of us approaches rehearsal differently, some give maximum effort, some (at least in my eye) give minimal effort. This causes animosity between individuals at rehearsal. This animosity can potentially hurt the performance of the section if it is not kept in check. Luckily for us it has not done so to this point. Luckily for us many of us have been doing drum corps for a long time and we are virtually automatic in the performance department. Hopefully we can come to terms as a section and all try to balance our efforts to have more productive rehearsals.

Now with that being said, we were very strong in all of those performance areas. Our roughest spot in the show is really coming together and with more reps it is going to be outstanding. There simply is no other contra line in DCI or DCA playing material this good. The parts groove and are fun to play. Wayne has clearly given us arguably his best ever contra book!

Each weekend we continue to get compliments from the staff along the lines of “great” and “excellent.” These need to continue, and with a more cohesive approach to rehearsal those sort of comments will come with greater frequency. The potential that we have once we are able to put aside all of our baggage is limitless. All I want to do is push things to their limit. This group has a real chance to live up to and possibly exceed my extremely high standard once we all commit ourselves to working together to achieve a common goal. Motivation is the first step. This weekend we have another opportunity to further our greatness. Lets take full advantage.