By Jeff Griffith, DCI.org
Every time Colin Plante heard those words — 14 times, to be exact — he knew something special was about to happen.
They all did, really. As they took the field at Wildcat Stadium in Marion, Indiana, Plante and his fellow corps members were the only ones who truly knew what was coming.
But for the time being, each of them remained perfectly still, seated with pristine posture, dispersed across a series of white, rectangular props. The structures, maybe three feet tall and organized in a pair of intersecting diagonal lines, found their crosshairs at the dead middle of the silent 100-yard canvas.
There, they waited. They waited impatiently. For those moments, which undoubtedly felt like hours, they bottled their excitement as best they could within the confines of their sleek, bright-red and jet-black uniforms.
Finally, though, their cue echoed off the stadium's red bleacher seats.
Presenting their 2019 program, “Experiment X,” Drum Corps International is proud to present…
The Spartans.
Met by a growing, ethereal wave of orchestral chords from the front ensemble percussion section, performers slowly began to fill the middle of the field. A brass quartet and a funky drum set backbeat kicked in the opening melody of Etienne Crausaz’s “Balkan Dance,” and the train was off and running.
By now, they’d done it a million times. There was nothing new about it. It never got old, though.
“We had fun performing this show every night,” Plante said. “It was a blast.”
But this was the one — not the last one, not the only one, maybe not even the best one, but the one that had the chance to go down in history.
This was Open Class Finals. This was the performance of a lifetime.
Even with everything at stake, though, director Richard Rigolini could sense it. There were no jitters in that show, at least not that he could see.
“It was cool to watch, because I was actually relaxed,” he said. “Because they weren’t nervous for a change.”
No, the nerves would come later that night, but even they wouldn’t last long. There was no need for them to.
In 2019, Spartans had that special recipe. There wasn’t a hitch. There wasn’t a setback. This was a corps that loved what it had the privilege to do every single day, and did it at a high level.
And it paid off.
“I’ve never been a part of something this excellent,” Plante said. “Every day we went, we just got better.”
“It was just, like, ‘Are you kidding me? This group is amazing.’”
GROWING CONFIDENCE
Plante, a fourth-year tuba player and leader as Spartans’ 2019 horn sergeant, likes to describe the corps’ second movement as “down and dirty.” He’s referring to a specific moment, though, and you can’t miss it.
Watching it at season’s end, it was like a party; it was impossible not to see how much each member lived for this sequence. Following an in-your-face snare drum feature, brass players grouped together in scattered forms off to the left side of the field and quickly built toward an intense full ensemble impact. The build wasn’t long, but you could feel the explosion coming.
Finally, they’d just let it fly; a fiery brass sound in a punchy, half-time groove, driving percussion passages, and one heck of a trumpet screamer — the whole nine.
But on a hot, early-season rehearsal day in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the energy just wasn’t there yet. In a way, Spartans’ brass staff wasn’t letting it be there yet.
The horn line had to earn what would come to be one of its favorite moments.
“At first, we’re playing this part, it’s written at triple-forte, and we’re rocking out, but we weren’t exactly rocking out,” Plante said. “We were playing it mezzo-forte, being staged like we were in the show, and we’re just playing.”
If you’ve performed in or been a part of a marching ensemble, you know how it goes. You’ve got to clean, fine-tune and meticulously woodshed every section of a production.
Then you can have some fun.
“Okay, we’re done. Play as loud as you can at this part.”
For Plante, that was the moment — well, the first moment.
It wasn’t a long passage of music — maybe 20 seconds or so — but there was just a different feeling in the air after this specific one reached its release.
“When we went full out,” Plante said. “Whole different animal.”
Plante described a scene in which horn line members — fresh off of their first opportunity to really take ownership of one of their show’s most energetic moments — celebrated, emphatically so, over a singular rep.
Brass players were jumping up and down in excitement, looking around at each other, almost in shock.
It was still so early; it wasn’t even June. By that point, not only had Spartans yet to receive a score in 2019 — they wouldn’t for another month — the corps hadn’t even fully "moved in" for its spring training rehearsals yet.
But something was brewing.
“That was the first moment where it set in, like, ‘This is cool, this is something special,’” Plante said. “Once we started to gain this confidence, if we all put out what we can put out, we could have something special happen.”
Spartans ended up earning a season-opening score of 59.300 points several weeks later in the same stadium, and backed it up with a 60.900 the same weekend in Lynn, Massachusetts.
As tends to be the case with the Open Class season, though, it takes a while before you can really get a reading on overall competitive standing. The way the Open Class tour is often laid out, with geographic locality being an early-season priority, many corps don’t see each other until a week or two before the season’s end, if that.
“When we get on tour, there’s so few shows, you just never know what can happen, so you don’t really have a lot of guide by scores and shows,” Rigolini said. “You know, we had good competition, so you don’t want to underestimate anybody or anything.”
Based on year-over-year trends, there was a general expectation that the Nashua corps would at least be in contention for a championship in 2019. The other two names often thrown in the same ring, though, were Gold and Legends.
The New England corps wasn’t actively talking about it — especially because neither of those corps was set to intersect with Spartans until late July — but it certainly wasn’t unknown.
“They were some of our biggest competition, Legends and Gold,” Plante said. “They had beaten us in the year prior.”
SIGNS OF SUCCESS
Plante didn’t feel all that great about Spartans’ hometown performance on July 20. And given what was at stake, that thought was unsettling.
The DCI New Hampshire tour event was, in theory, the corps’ first chance to make a major statement. With Legends in town, positioning was up for grabs. Obviously, nothing would be locked in based on one night’s results, but Plante saw this as a proving ground for his corps.
Perhaps, with that in mind, Plante was hypersensitive to the intricacies of the night’s run-through. Regardless, he didn’t leave the field with the highest of hopes.
“I wasn’t expecting a win, I’m going to be honest,” he said. “It was a solid show, but I knew it was a little dirty.”
That night, Spartans won by more than a point and a half. Three nights later, they went two-for-two, earning a similarly-sized lead.
Over the latter portion of July, wins began to pile up. Many involved in the Spartans organization didn’t realize it at the time, but they still hadn’t lost to a single Open Class corps as the month neared its close.
So, on the final day of July, opportunity came knocking once again. In Farmington, Minnesota — with just a week remaining until 2019’s Open Class medals would be handed out and locked into history — Spartans finally had their first chance to meet up with the defending Open Class bronze medalist, one of 2018’s breakout corps, Gold.
And again, Plante found himself feeling uneasy after the evening’s run.
“We had a bad show, in my opinion,” he said. “Some people were like, ‘Okay, it was just an average show.’ The crowd wasn’t really into it.”
Spartans posted a mark of 77.450 that night. Gold’s tally was 76.200 — both formidable numbers, both well ahead of schedule from 2018. But whatever negatives Plante was perceiving from some of these key performances, the judges continued to disagree.
And with another victory, the calendar turned to August. Nothing felt set in stone to those within Spartans’ walls, but to date, no Open Class corps had even scored within half a point of the emerging front runners from Nashua.
“I’m like, ‘Wow,’” Plante said. “‘Yeah, we’ve got something special this season.’ Once we had met those two really strong competitors, it was like, we’re going to try our best to win this thing.”
EYES ON THE PRIZE
When Tuesday, August 6 finally rolled around, the day of the Open Class Finals in Marion, Indiana, it felt just like another ordinary day to Plante.
Chalk it up to Spartans’ never-wavering day-to-day work ethic as a corps, perhaps, but Plante and company just went about their business.
As if they weren’t about 12 hours away from what could very well be their corps’ first championship title in over a decade.
Even in the morning, though, that wasn’t just another ordinary Tuesday. Spartans didn’t just wake up, eat breakfast and hit the practice field. They took time to play their corps song, Shostakovich’s “Fire of Eternal Glory,” together. They honored their graduating age-out corps members, Plante and his sixth-year mellophone-playing fiancée Sarah Gallagher included.
But it didn't feel any different. Maybe, Plante didn't want it to.
“Stuff’s not hitting me,” Plante said. “I’m aging out, I’m never going to be able to do this again, this was potentially the first time I’d be able to get a gold medal — it’s in reach — and nothing’s hitting me. Nothing’s setting in.”
“It just kind of felt unreal,” Gallagher added. “I just couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that this was it for me.”
But at that point, all eyes were transfixed on the prize. No one was really talking about the prize, likely so as to not jinx it, but there was no avoiding how closely it was within reach.
Plante readily admitted it — It would have been so easy to rest on the laurels of what was an 11-night win streak up to that point.
He even referred to it as his “biggest fear.”
‘Guys, we’re winning, why do we have to keep adding to the show? Why do we keep having to rehearse 13 hours a day? Come on.’
“‘Would this happen?’” He’d ask himself. It could certainly have been an understandable attitude to develop over the course of such a successful summer.
“It didn’t.”
“The season, it wasn’t over from the start, and it wasn’t over the day before Finals,” he added. “We didn’t, at any time — this is what I think made us so successful — we didn’t coast on our undefeated season.”
So, when corps ceremonies ceased on the morning of August 6, Spartans remained perfectly locked in; they did exactly what they’d done every day that summer.
They rehearsed for several hours, they packed up, and they departed for Wildcat Stadium at Indiana Wesleyan University, the brand-new site of the DCI Open Class World Championships. They arrived and unloaded, and settled in for warmups. Finally at 10:15 p.m., they took the field, and they took it by storm.
This was the one.
“The whole day was pretty calm, relaxed, everybody did their thing,” Rigolini said. “But the corps itself did a great job performance-wise, that was the best thing to watch all day long.”
FINAL COUNTDOWN
When it came time to start handing out awards in Marion, Spartans never really felt 100 percent sure of what to expect until all was said and done.
Even after a lights-out performance, there were still question marks in members’ minds.
“Going into it, we all knew we had a great show,” Gallagher said. “But you’re always thinking, ‘Was it good enough? How did the other groups do? What if they came through?’”
For the time being, they’d have to hold all of that in. As is tradition, every member of each of the 12 finalist corps stood at attention on the field of competition as scores were slowly announced in ascending order.
At the very least, Spartans had to know they’d likely be somewhere among the top three. So, for the first three-quarters of the night, they’d have to focus on caption awards.
Brass. Color Guard. Visual. Percussion. General Effect.
They’re like "Infinity stones." The awards get rattled off intermittently between the countdown of corps’ overall placements, and the more of them you start to win, the better you’re starting to feel about your chances.
The first one for Best Brass Performance, came directly after the announcement of 11th place. That one was pretty important to Plante.
Spartans got it. One down.
As the horn sergeant, Plante was positioned at the front of the horn line’s block on the field, and it was his job to turn around and direct the corps in its own “salute” of sorts each time Spartans received any recognition.
Gallagher, however, was a few rows back into the form. She could see Plante through the spaces between her fellow corps members, and each time he’d make that 180-degree turn — first for brass, then color guard, then visual — she could see it more and more.
“I remember, every caption award, he would turn around and be just smiling, like, ‘Alright guys, this is going great,’” Gallagher said. “I was also standing next to my friend Molly, I’d been marching with her since 2014, we were both age-outs, and I remember sometimes looking out of the corner of my eye to look at Molly, because I’m sure we were both feeling the same thing.”
But the Spartans didn’t take percussion. That one went to Legends. So, not that anyone in the corps necessarily expected it, but there wouldn’t be a sweep. They couldn’t relax just yet.
The Best General Effect award is the big one, though, and Plante knew that. It’s the last award announced, and as the most heavily-weighted caption on the scoresheet. It’s often a good indicator of the overall results.
And when Spartans won it — announced just before the distribution of medals — things started to get real. It’s not likely anyone was thinking this deeply in the heat of the moment, but it would have been hard to imagine a mathematical scenario in which a group that won every single caption award, save percussion, wouldn’t end up on top.
It was only a matter of time.
The bronze medal went to Gold, which came as a surprise to some, if only because the California corps had entered the night in second place. That announcement left two corps awaiting their 2019 fates, Legends and Spartans.
The two were quite familiar from a competitive standpoint; they’d met 32 times in Plante’s four seasons of drum corps — which is a pretty frequent amount for two Open Class corps that aren’t exactly in close proximity to one another — and it’d been pretty close every time. But according to Plante, the competitors were quite friendly.
With no disrespect to Gold, he was happy to see Legends earn their first-ever silver medal.
But Legends’ silver medal meant Spartans’ gold. When second place was announced, first was no longer in doubt, even though it still didn’t feel real, at least not until it was officially cemented into history by Brad Bell, the evening's public address announcer.
“Presenting your 2019 Drum Corps International Open Class World Champions, receiving the gold medal, with a score of eighty-one—”
Bedlam.
Neither Plante nor Gallagher — nor, likely, anyone in their corps — heard the words that completed that sentence.
Eighty-one? This was a corps that had topped out between 74 and 76 points in each of the past four seasons. After scoring a 79.825 in the Open Class Prelims, sure, an eighty seemed plausible.
But eighty-one?
Gallagher and Plante knew exactly where they wanted to go when the awards ceremony was finally over and ranks were broken. More than anything, they wanted to find each other.
Of course, they had to go through a few people to get there. And everyone wanted a hug.
"She was the one I wanted to go to,” Plante said. “Sarah and I make eye contact, and I just get hugged by someone else. So, I think she was the second or third person who I got to see. That was the first thing on my mind, though, ‘Where is Sarah? I need to hug Sarah.’”
As the director, Richard Rigolini’s first thought was about the medals. He wanted to make sure every member got one before anyone else had the chance.
Once that was settled, he thanked his staff. He surveyed the sea of red and black uniforms that had descended into absolute pandemonium.
This wasn’t his first championship, but it was his first since 2007. It had been a long time coming. It was a sweet moment.
“I just walked around,” Rigolini said. “The drum corps was pretty much crazy at that time, I tried to congratulate as many kids as I could.”
But all of that celebration Rigolini witnessed from afar was almost secondary, in a way, to Plante.
He’d done it five times that night, but the moment that seemed to stick with him more than any other was his last turnaround. After leading the corps in its acceptance of four caption awards, he got to do so one final time at the ceremony’s culmination.
With the dream officially a reality, he turned and looked his fellow horn line members in the eye. He’d spent the entire summer fighting tooth and nail alongside each and every one of them to create something special. And they’d done it. They’d really done it.
“We did this, guys.”
“I turn around, and I’m just smiling at all of them,” he said. “We’re all just smiling at each other. Half of them were in tears, half of them are yelling, and I’m just trying to keep my cool, like, ‘We just won this thing.’ It was pretty crazy.
“It was so satisfying," he added. "It was heartwarming. I think about it now, it almost brings me to tears, there’s something so special about that.”
NEW HEIGHTS
But the road didn’t end in Marion.
Often times, though — in one sense — it does.
Rigolini admitted it, and both Plante and Gallagher agreed. Once the Open Class Championships — previously held in Michigan City, Indiana, up until 2018 — conclude, Spartans have had a tendency to take the foot off the gas.
“We leave the Open Class shows, and we usually do our best job that week on Tuesday,” Rigolini said. “And Thursday and Friday are sometimes a struggle for us.”
In their defense, the corps’ Open Class placement is already locked in by that point, and it’s been a long summer. Depending on how you look at it, there aren't necessarily a ton of extra accolades up for grabs when the Nashua corps transitions to Indianapolis to face off against the field of World Class corps at the DCI World Championships.
“In years past, sometimes people were like, ‘Well, we did what we wanted to do,’” Gallagher added. “‘I’m kind of tired, I kind of just want to go home.’”
Once again, though, this corps had different DNA in 2019.
Plante chalked it up to the excitement of the show and the attitude of the corps members. They didn’t care that they’d already won a championship.
They knew they had likely three more chances to perform one of, arguably, the most special shows in Spartans history — twice as a competitor in Prelims and Semifinals, and once at the end of the Semifinals competition as the Open Class champions’ encore performance.
So, this time, they just decided to go for it. To the Spartans, there was still plenty to prove.
“We were like, ‘Let’s show them why we won,’” Gallagher said. “The Spartans just took back the first-place title for the first time since 2007, let’s show them why. Let’s show them why we beat records and were undefeated, let’s not stop being excellent.”
“We didn’t want it to end,” Plante added. “That’s why it was so good; we didn’t want it to end.”
So the Nashua corps arrived in the Circle City with a fire still blazing behind it, and it showed up in the scoresheets. This was the Spartans’ first and only chance to really prove themselves against some of their World Class counterparts. And they showed up.
Spartans ended in 19th place after Friday’s Semifinals competition. Previously, they’d never finished higher than 23rd in Indianapolis.
Here’s the thing, though; it was never about any of that. All of that was just a happy side effect — the icing on the cake.
The Spartans were just having fun — fun performing an electric show, fun experiencing success, fun experiencing each other, fun improving and setting new standards.
That was the beauty of it all.
“Everyone was just having a blast out there and really enjoying our time,” Gallagher said. “I think we just really enjoyed what we were doing and the fact that we were doing so well was a great motivation, just to keep getting better and doing our best.”
“Being excellent is fun.”
RISKS AND REWARDS
Spartans’ show really was something special, especially to everyone involved with the corps. It wasn’t just a step in a new direction, and it honestly wasn’t even just a leap.
It was a risk — a risk well worth taking, in program coordinator Matt McGuire’s eyes.
“It’s sort of like ripping off a band-aid,” he said.
Every experiment is a risk, though, so that was kind of the idea. You take a shot at something bold, daring and new, knowing full well it might not stick, but knowing how special of a discovery it could become if it does.
Thus was the spirit of “Experiment X.” For 10 years — hence the ‘X’ — since taking a hiatus from competitive drum corps in 2009, Spartans had toyed around with new, modern design aspects.
Over that decade, and most notably toward the back end of it, they’d taken their stab at minor trial runs of new concepts — electronics, props, slightly-tweaked uniforms, etc. — but in 2019, there was a collective understanding that it was time to just throw caution to the wind and go for it.
Everything was kicked into a new gear, in terms of design, for Spartans in 2019. The corps had an eye-catching new uniform, and instead of maybe utilizing simple backdrops or a lone visual centerpiece as props, Spartans' armada of rectangular structures was integrated, in a variety of unique ways, in all parts of the show’s design.
Spartans had members pumping up the crowd and doing cartwheels on the field. Their repertoire was littered with contemporary music — ”Shallow” from A Star is Born, “Shofukan” by Snarky Puppy.
“We kind of took a look at where we’ve been in the last five to 10 years, and kind of felt that it was a good opportunity to try something different and try to be a little more fresh and try to incorporate these ideas,” McGuire said. “We felt like we didn’t want to get to a place where we were starting to get stale.”
There was always some new wrinkle to add, and performers got to let their personalities show through those moments. There was never a point during the season when Spartans stopped trying new things.
As McGuire described it, the Nashua corps had an initial vision and foundation — a “script,” if you will — but there was endless room for the “actors” to improvise and take ownership.
And they loved it.
So, it was understandably bittersweet when it finally came time for the Spartans to take the field for what would, without any doubt, be their last run of the 2019 production.
To some, the Friday night encore at the DCI World Championship Semifinals — reserved for the newly-crowned Open Class champions — didn’t feel like it was going to be the last one. But it was. Eventually, it had to come to an end.
Prior to their last performance as age-outs, Plante and Gallagher both remembered waiting in the stadium tunnel, sticking their heads out during the final competitive performance of the day — that of the Bluecoats — and seeing what was likely the largest crowd of their collective careers waiting for them.
“I thought to myself, ‘I’m going to perform for that,’” Plante said. “And Sarah and I just started laughing at each other, like, ‘This is crazy.’”
The way Plante described that performance, it was over in the blink of an eye.
“I wasn’t accepting that this was the last time,” he said. “I wanted to wake up and perform this show again tomorrow. And at the end of it, that’s when I realized that I couldn’t.”
For Gallagher, though, it seemed to go in slow-motion.
But there wasn’t really much time to reflect on things after the final notes of “Experiment X” echoed throughout Lucas Oil Stadium.
Before she knew it, Gallagher was passing off her mellophone — the same mellophone she’d held for six years, the one she had affectionately named “Amelia” — to one of her fellow performers, Trevor Stoyer, to be put on Spartans’ equipment truck.
For Gallagher, and Plante, and a handful of other Spartans, it was time to graduate; the annual age-out ceremony commenced not long after the corps’ encore performance.
“I remember (Stoyer) was asking me, like, ‘How are you doing?’” She said. “I was like, ‘I don’t know!’”
When so many emotional, meaningful moments happen one, after another, after another, it’s not easy to fully soak them all in. Looking back, though, it couldn’t have been better.
It really was the perfect season, with the perfect ending, when you think about it. Everything you could ask for out of a summer of drum corps — the memories, the special show, the success, the growth, maybe an undefeated résumé and championship title along the way — Spartans got it.
“I don’t know, it was just very unforgettable, like all of those feelings and just the culmination of all my six years in the Spartans,” Gallagher said. “I couldn’t have asked for a better time."
“I just love the Spartans.”
ONLY THE BEGINNING
It’s hard for Sarah Gallagher to explain just how special this summer was, to friends of hers who aren’t involved in marching music.
They understand the concept of the activity, but the gravity of it all — everything Gallagher and her corps accomplished in 2019 — doesn’t fully stick.
“Some of my friends know I do drum corps,” she said. “But I’m like, ‘Oh, we won this summer,’ and they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s cool.’”
“And I’m like, ‘You know, it really is so cool.’”
It’s really no simple task to fully qualify how meaningful this year was to the Spartans organization without taking a step back and seeing the broader narrative.
It took 10 years to get back to this point, but this was the culmination of so much more. Everything clicked in 2019 — a bold and creative design team, a motivated membership and a devoted staff, all of whom were ready to take things to the next level.
“We’ve tried nine times to get this thing, to get that gold medal,” Plante said. “Well, here’s number 10.”
And with each facet of the organization having collectively taken that step, it’s not just the pinnacle of all that’s come before, it’s really the stepping-off point of the future — a very, very bright future.
According to McGuire, that’s what seemed to excite the membership more than anything about 2019’s production. Its historical value was certainly important, but its forward-looking implications really appeared to stick with each performer above all else.
“The members wanted to make sure they would continue our tradition and try to achieve excellence, but also sort of redefine what the drum corps was, and kind of leave their mark,” McGuire said. “I think that’s what they were excited about, it was a really good balance of understanding and appreciating the history, and some of those aspects of it, but also kind of setting up the future of what the drum corps was going to be.”
And make no mistake, McGuire and company fully plan for 2019 to be the launch pad into a new artistic identity.
2020 and beyond aren’t going to be copy-and-pastes of this season; in McGuire’s words, that would be “inauthentic.” The building blocks are in place, though, to make sure 2019 is only the start of Spartans’ innovative, experimental and no-holds-barred design mindset.
But Spartans’ future is so much more than musical notes on a staff and visual dots on a grid.
Plante and Gallagher both described a pre-2019 version of Spartans that was plenty relevant, but maybe not always making major noise and headlines. For nine years, one of the more decorated Open Class corps was pretty much smack in between third and fifth places every single season.
“That’s kind of like this mediocre spot,” Plante said. “You’re not feeling as good as those on the top, but you’re not bad, you’re just this in-between drum corps that people like and respect. And that was about it.”
This summer changed that narrative. Spartans were never anything to scoff at, but the 2019 season sent shockwaves into the drum corps community.
As a result, interest for 2020 is soaring. People took notice of what the Nashua corps did this summer; they couldn’t help but notice.
For age-outs like Plante and Gallagher, they won’t necessarily be part of the future that lies ahead of the Spartans organization. But as their corps evolves into new frontiers, they’ll forever have those gold medals to serve as reminders of what they set in motion.
“We started a legacy this year,” Plante said. “I don’t get to be part of it, but these members, are you kidding me? How good are they going to be next year?”
As it all unfolds, make no mistake, they’ll be watching. They’ll be watching proudly.
Every time they see their corps take the field, they’ll know something special is coming.
It’ll never get old.
“I’m already excited,” Gallagher said. “Even though I’m not going to be on the field in the future, I just can’t wait to see what comes in the following years.”
