bandScores' 2024 Year in Review

A note from the owner and operator of bandScores:

I don’t know about you guys, but 2024 has FLOWN BY for me.

Beyond all the work I did for the bandScores site and Instagram page this year, my personal life was as busy as ever. When I wasn’t working my full time job or giving my limited free time to bandScores, I was busy being a dad. My wife and I welcomed our first child in late 2023 and parenthood for us has been a journey since. It’s had plenty of highs and lows, but for us, I think 2024 will be most remembered for surviving the first full year and seeing our newborn grow up way too fast. So despite the year flying by, it was a great one for me.

But more importantly, 2024 was an incredibly monumental year for the marching arts activity that we all know and love. All three major marching arts organizations - WGI, DCI, and Music for All/BOA - and their participants delivered yet again and gave us memorable seasons across the board. WGI gave us a mix of first time champions like Fusion Winter Guard, and a continuation of dynasties like Pulse Percussion, Chino Hills HS percussion, and Avon HS in both guard and winds. Bluecoats were the main storyline for a very intriguing DCI season that saw the Ohio based corps complete their first ever undefeated season en route to their second ever championship. The year was rounded out with the largest BOA season and Grand National Championships ever, which was won by Avon HS for a second consecutive year.

bandScores exists because of these organizations that I can’t thank enough for providing a foundation for this project to even exist. bandScores started as nothing more than a passion project and my way to give back to the activity by providing a tool that I hope others would use and appreciate. This year proved that there is such a want and need for this type of work and I can’t thank everyone enough for the support you showed this year.

You like data too, right?

Because bandScores revolves around all things numbers and data, I thought it’d be fun to share some year end numbers about the site:

• bandscores.net was visited over 41,000 times by over 25,000 users from 76 countries around the world. After the United States, the most users came from Canada, the United Kingdom, Netherlands, and Sweden.

• The most popular pages were our 2024 Winter Guard Scores page which was visited over 23,000 times and our 2024 BOA Scores page which was visited over 9,000 times. Unsurprisingly, the site also saw the most traffic during WGI Color Guard World Championships and BOA Grand Nationals.

• The bandScores Instagram page began the year with less than 2,000 followers but more than doubled that number to finish with over 4,700.

• A lot of scores were added to the site. And I mean A LOT. Here’s the full breakdown:

  • 3,205 scores for WGI Color Guard

  • 16,076 scores from local winter guard circuits

  • 1,673 scores for WGI Percussion and Winds

  • 610 scores for DCI

  • 1,261 scores for BOA

  • For a grand total of…. 22,825 scores

Beyond covering scores for the various competitive seasons, there were a number of other projects big and small that were accomplished. Those included:

• Launching a redesigned website

• Launching a historic score pages for WGI Color Guard

• Expanding the DCI Historic Scores and BOA Historic Scores pages to include data going back to 2006 and 2000 respectively

• Relaunching the b(AI)ndScores model that predicted scores and placements for the BOA and DCI seasons. Both iterations did quite well with its predictions.

• A lot of written content published at bandscores.net/blog including the DCI Imperialism Map series, the WGI Milestones series, and an analysis of DCI’s #MarchDrumCorps project.

What comes next for bandScores in 2025?

In all, it was a very busy, but also very fulfilling and amazing year that definitely set the bar for an even better 2025. I won’t make concrete promises or timelines on what to expect from bandScores in 2025, but here’s a list of some projects that are being brainstormed about or even already in development:

• Improving user experience and site usability. The Looker Studio dashboards have been a great launching point for a lot of our projects, but it may be time to find a tool that is more user friendly, especially for mobile users.

• Finally launching a historic scores page for WGI Percussion and Winds

• Thanks to WGI for making their scores since 2012 available, both the Guard and Percussion/Winds scores pages will be expanded to include that data

• Finally publishing record books for each activity (I’ve been working on these on and off for quite some time now)

• Per usual, covering scores from the 2025 WGI, DCI, and BOA seasons

Your support is so greatly appreciated now and in the new year

As always, I remain committed to keeping bandScores as a free and open access resource for the marching arts community. That being said, beyond the thousands of hours of work I have put into growing bandScores into what it is today, I have spent money towards operational expenses to keep this project alive. Services such as web hosting, data storage, and cloud computing are unfortunately not free but necessary for some of this work and to help provide the best user experience.

If you enjoyed the bandScores site and content in 2024, I would graciously ask that you please consider contributing financially on our Buy Me a Coffee page. Even a small $5 contribution would go a long way towards helping offsetting some of these operational expenses. Any revenue generated from the Buy Me a Coffee page will be directly invested back into bandScores or donated back into the marching arts community.

Once again, I am so grateful for everyone’s support in making 2024 the biggest and best year yet for bandScores. I can’t wait to see what 2025 brings and hope you continue to follow along. Many wishes to you for a wonderful, healthy, and happy New Year!