INDIANAPOLIS, IN — Seattle Cascades drum major Joey Massey stepped off his podium. The 70,000 seats around him suddenly didn’t seem as intimidating.
His feet touched the Lucas Oil Stadium turf and an ear-to-ear smile began to form on his face. He couldn’t shake it, the excitement from the Seattle Cascades’ DCI World Championship Prelims performance was everything he could have asked for.
“I think we were ready,” Massey said. “The past couple days we’ve been rehearsing really hard. They’ve been pulling up the chains, ready to go. They filled the stadium up, I am so proud of them.”
It was also arguably the Cascades’ most important run of the season. The Cascades knew going into the day they were going to be right around the cut-off line for a spot in Top 25.
Seattle Cascades powered their way into 25th place at Thursday's DCI World Championship Prelims in Indianapolis.
If they didn’t energize and excite the afternoon crowd in Indianapolis, a chance to return on Friday likely would have been out of the question. Massey was well aware of that before the Cascades’ Prelims run began.
He prepared his corps for it.
“We wanted to make sure that, yes, there’s energy but it’s also like, ‘Hey, let’s be technical about this so it’s not getting out of control and we keep everything that we’ve done and rehearsed clean,” he said.
“For us, this was just a good chance to show, ‘Hey, we’re Cascades. Look what we’re doing.’ We wanted to turn some heads.”
That they did, both the audience's and judges'.
About an hour after Massey dismounted off his podium, the scores came in. By a margin of just one tenth of a point, the Cascades nabbed the No. 25 spot, securing its first Semifinal berth since 2016.
“It was incredibly important to us to throw down a good run tonight and try and vault ourselves into the Semis,” Massey said. “We’re in a place where we’re kind of in a transition trying to get momentum in the corps for years to come.”
Louisiana Stars finished just shy of a Semifinalist berth in 26th place at Thursday's DCI World Championship Prelims.
The Cascades’ close call, though, has a flip side.
The Louisiana Stars, which finished fourth at the Open Class Finals on Tuesday, missed out on its first DCI World Championship Semis appearance ever by a tenth of a point. It would be easy to be furious, aggravated at the least.
The Stars have a different outlook.
“I’ll be honest with you, because of our performance at Open Class Finals, as a corps, we are happy with what we did and we continually say, ‘Scores don’t matter, placements don’t matter, but performances matter,’” Louisiana Stars’ drum major Jaden Romero said. “Regardless of how we end up, we’re going to be happy as a corps because of what we’ve accomplished this year.”
Even without the Semifinals appearance, 2019 will still go down as Louisiana Stars' best year to date. The Lafayette corps' Open Class Finals showing not only boosted them to their highest finish, it handed them the corps’ best final score ever by almost two-and-a-half-points.
It took the pressure off in Indianapolis. If they made Semis, great. If not, there were plenty of other accomplishments on which they could hang their hat this season.
“We really set the expectation high with our Finals performance in Marion,” Romero said. “We left knowing that that was the best run we’ve ever had, and going into this, we just wanted to have fun and enjoy it.”
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