ROSEMONT, Illinois — The Cavaliers are laser-focused.

The competitive Drum Corps International Tour is still months away, but the corps is fully locked in for 2020. Everything, down to the smallest of minutia, is being fine-tuned and honed. 

It’s all about the details — even the direction pencils are pointing when they’re placed on a music stand. 

“I think the immense focus on detail has improved tremendously over the past couple of years,” baritone section leader Sam Konzem said. “All of these little things are the things that we've been stressing so much these last couple of camps, and I think that's going to definitely be evident in the product.”

The Cavaliers held a brass-only camp at Rosemont Elementary School in the corps’ hometown February 21-23, which provided an opportunity to zero in on the members of the horn line in preparation for the summer tour. 

This is the third full season that has featured the corps’ current brass staff, led by caption supervisor Michael Martin, caption manager Kevin LaBoeuf, caption coordinator Drew Dickey and caption administrator Claire Pittman. Under this group, the brass section in particular has already seen dividends being paid off. 

2020 CavaliersDrew Dickey works with The Cavaliers' horn line at the corps' February brass rehearsal camp in Rosemont.


“For the past couple seasons, it’s been about developing the standard and expectation,” Dickey said. “What's great is as the staff continues to push that expectation forward, the members kind of rise to it and even push it further, which is great.”

2019 was a prime example. The Cavaliers were, statistically, the most-improved corps among any of the top-six finishers from start to finish of the summer. 

The corps’ fifth-place final score of 95.400 at the DCI World Championship Finals was its best since 2011, when the corps earned a bronze medal. It’s even higher than The Cavaliers’ output in 2017, when the corps earned fourth overall.

But, for a second, do what the corps itself did a few weekends ago, and zoom in a little bit; zoom in on the horn line, specifically. This group scored third in the brass caption when all was said and done last season, and placed among the top three or four pretty much throughout the entire summer.

That kind of success can be credited to many factors. But it starts with, as mentioned, the little things.

“(The staff) definitely set the initial precedent,” Konzem said. “But I think the members have done a good job of meeting that precedent and really going above what is expected of them and really putting in the time in the off-season.”

The aim, entering 2020, is not only to build upon the success of 2019, but also to not let there be even a blip of drop-off. The Cavaliers heated up down the stretch of the 2019 season, and they don’t plan to cool off for even a second.

“We're being held to a level that would be expected in spring training or later, like June or July, or even August, as early as February, which is something that's going to really, really help us down the line,” Konzem said. “And it's also an ideal that I think the members have really, really bought into. And it's definitely beginning to show.”

It’s a shared goal, not only by the veteran members of the horn line, but by the new faces they’ve welcomed as well.  

That process of new-member assimilation — especially when it comes to a large influx of performers with experience in other corps who join the veteran-laden group —  into the fabric of The Cavaliers, according to drum major Davis Henry, has gone noticeably well. 

“People come in and they instantly kind of mold into it,” he said. 

Following an array of satellite audition camps that spanned as far as Texas, California, Georgia and even Japan, February’s camp marked the first chance for the newly-formed horn line to rehearse as one unit, marking another step closer to putting the pieces together for 2020.

The weekend was also a chance to fine-tune show music for the upcoming season, and one movement they’ve been working on in particular has been the talk of the performers.

2020 CavaliersA trombone player rehearses at The Cavaliers' February brass camp in Rosemont.


Returning members spoke of 2019’s ballad movement as a highlight of the production — The Cavaliers performed a gut-wrenching arrangement of “Cathedral” from the 2002 film “The Road to Perdition” as part of 2019’s “The Wrong Side of the Tracks” production — and are now equally raving about their 2020 ballad.

“I think one of our staff members said earlier that the ballad is the hardest piece of music this corps has played, maybe ever,” Konzem said. “It's harmonically dense, and there's levels of intonation that we haven't even dug into yet that are, I think leagues above what we've done in the past.” 

In terms of the 2020 production itself, the Rosemont corps has yet to publicize any information, but Dickey says that fans can expect plenty of The Cavaliers’ familiar design characteristics, but with noticeable differences from what the corps put on the field in 2019. 

“For us, it's about creating a really engaging and dynamic product that people can wrap their arms around and enjoy and celebrate with the guys,” he said. “So, yeah, we're excited about the product. It’s very Cavaliers, but again, just like last season, just a very different turn for us.”

View The Cavaliers’ 2020 Tour Schedule