Dateline: Buffalo—August 11, 2001The 2001 DCI SUMMER MUSIC GAMES World Championships came to a smashing conclusion Saturday night as The Cavaliers won the DIVISON I World Championship with a score of 98.35, besting Blue Devils and The Cadets, who tied for 2nd place with a 97.6.The Cavaliers captured the Visual GE and Music GE, Ensemble Visual, Color Guard, and Ensemble Music, scoring perfect 10s in Visual Repertoire, Visual Ensemble Composition, Color Guard Content and Percussion Technique.Blue Devils captured the Visual Performance and Brass Music captions, scoring perfect 10s in the Visual Ensemble Excellence and Brass Musicality sub-captions.As close as things were this week, either of the top three could easily have walked off the field last. The Cadets moved up from third in Semifinals with a stellar performance, winning the Percussion Music caption.This had been one of the closest battles between the top three corps that DCI has seen in several years. Although it wasn't needed this season at the very top, it's a good thing that DCI had established the tie-breaking rules, just in case there was a tie for first. Interestingly, it was brought up that, had the exact caption placements in Quarterfinals been replicated in Finals, an interesting phenomenon would have occurred. The first two tie-breakers to be employed would have still resulted in...guess what? By adding up the ordinals, (the rankings from each judge for each corps), each of the top three corps ended up with 17 ordinals. The second tie-breaker is the number of judges who rank each corps first in their respective captions. In Quarterfinals, this would have resulted in a two-way tie between The Cavaliers and The Cadets. Of course, we didn't have a numerical tie in Quarterfinals, so the above observations are moot. However, it makes for interesting speculation.Fourth place went to Santa Clara Vanguard with a score of 95.35, staying on top of Glassmen as had been the trend all season. SCV took 2nd place in Brass Music. Glassmen took 5th place with a score of 94.3.Phantom Regiment took 6th place, their score of 91.9 putting the corps once again into the top six.Crossmen placed 7th with a 91.15, taking 5th place in Color Guard.Bluecoats stayed in 8th with a 90.75, taking sixth place in Music GE, Performance Visual and Brass Music.Boston Crusaders took 9th place with an 88.8.Carolina Crown passed up Madison Scouts, scoring 86.95 and finishing in 10th place, with a 7th place finish in Percussion Music.Madison Scouts fell one position to finish in 11th place with a score of 86.55, taking 7th place in Brass Music and 9th place in Ensemble Music.Colts finished in 12th with a score of 84.9, enjoying being back in Finals after a one year layoff.The specialty caption awards are averaged from scores in Quarterfinals, Semifinals, and Finals: The Jim Ott High Brass Award was awarded to Blue Devils. The Fred Sanford Best Percussion Performance Award was captured by The Cadets. Blue Devils took Best Visual Performance honors and Best Color Guard. The Cavaliers won Best Overall GE. The Jim Jones Leadership Award to an outstanding Division I drum major was award to Mark Irons of Santa Clara Vanguard.The next time we meet for the DCI SUMMER MUSIC GAMES World Championships, we'll be celebrating DCI's 30th Anniversary in Madison, Wisconsin, just a handful of miles from where the first championship was held in Whitewater, Wisconsin. Tickets can be ordered elsewhere on this web site.If you like reading about drum corps on this web site, you'll enjoy seeing Worlds live even more. We hope to see you in the summer of 2002.