URBANDALE!!! Steve Buscemi is somewhere being SO PROUD OF YOU!!!!! You guys rocked it once again and brought home your goal......couldn't be happier for my Studio posse!! You are a blessing to work with on every possible level. Love you guys! God bless, Damon
Best Crew-Power Company
Best Band-Studio
Best Male Soloist-Dowling Dimensions
Best Female Soloist-Emmetsburg High Voltage (Emily Schmidt)
Best Costumes-Power Company
Most Original Show-Indianola FlipSide
3A
1st Emmetsburg High Voltage
2nd Emmetsburg Black and Gold
3rd New Group
2A
Premiere
Prep
1st Vitality
2nd FlipSide
3rd The Current
4th Jive
5th SideWayz
4A
1st Studio
2nd Power Company
3rd Dimensions
4th Jefferson Connection
5th Indianola SideOne
Finalists (No Order)
Emmetsburg High Voltage
Dowling Dimensions
Indianola SideOne
Waconia Power Company
Jefferson Connection
Urbandale Studio
These awards were announced really fast so if I messed up on any I'm sorry!
You know, like Jay mentioned, growing up in Iowa has allowed us to become familiar with how Iowa classifies show choirs. We just know how it is because we grow up with it in athletics.
Although Iowa has the most choirs in a single state, Indiana, California, and Ohio are not far behind at all (and when you compare Iowa to the number of show choirs nationwide, it's a small percentage like any other state). 1A, 2A, 3A, and 4A are not confusing if you know that "4" is the top (in Ohio, it's reversed, for example), and that the breakdown is by school size (the worst way to do it), but that isn't explicit just from reading the division titles and not every competition uses every division. As was pointed out, there is no "1A" here - so without a legend, it's difficult to understand what "2A," "3A," and "4A" are supposed to mean on their own. Why is there an "A" anyway? If you're going to separate by school size, why not just use "Large," "Medium," and "Small Division" or something?
I agree that we should get things back on track, but I encourage you to voice your opinion here: http://www.showchoir.com/forums/topic.php?id=24734 since there's already a discussion going on this very subject!
You know, like Jay mentioned, growing up in Iowa has allowed us to become familiar with how Iowa classifies show choirs. We just know how it is because we grow up with it in athletics. We know that there are Womens, Prep, 1A, 2A, 3A & 4A divisions and we know what they mean. Which I believe helps us in the long run because understanding Iowa's excessively tiered system allows us to figure out less-broken down systems from other states.
Really though Iowa's system is not that confusing when you think about it. 1A, 2A, 3A, and 4A is just like one big open class broken down into tiers based on school size with 1A being smallest and 4A being largest, like Jay explained. I believe that at most, if not all, competitions in Iowa which classify the choirs like this that all choirs regardless of 1A, 2A, 3A, or 4A are *technically* on equal footing where finals are concerned (as if it were one open class). You just inherently know that 4A typically (not always, but typically) means higher level choir and the lower you go in class size, the lower level of choir you get. Iowa, as you all know, has more show choirs than any other state in the nation but a majority of them are from very small schools that cannot realistically put together a championship level show choir program. So this classification break down provides realistic goals of finding success by winning their class. To me it almost seems like Iowa divides the open class into 4 tiers to provide trophies for the smaller schools who they know won't make finals against schools 2, 3, to even 10 times their size but want to show their appreciation for their hard work since show choir is competitive, after all. And in order to keep a program going, you have to have some level of success otherwise the interest will eventually possibly fade. This is probably nowhere near why it is like this but it makes sense in my mind, kind of.
This topic has veered from the competition at hand, but man it is an interesting topic that has been a highlight of SCC lately! Very interesting.
Can someone explain what the different tiers are?? In MN we just do class A and class AA
They just separate schools by enrollment size. Mostly used for sports, but they are used for other activities as well. They change depending on the sport (football and basketball have MANY teams, where tennis only has 1A and 2A because not as many schools participate)
In general (these are for football, but widely used):
4A- Enrollment 700 and larger, plus smaller schools from 4A conferences (starting in 2016-17, the largest 48 schools will be in Class 4A, regardless of enrollment)
3A- Next Largest 56
2A- Next Largest 56
1A- Next Largest 56
A- Remaining 11 player schools
8-player- Option for smaller schools- usually enrollment less than 115
Catholic schools like Xavier, Wahlert, Dowling, Sioux City Bishop Heelan sometimes compete in 3A for sports playoffs, but also sometimes compete in 4A, or at least for sure play against 4A schools in the regular season.
In Iowa, for show choir, 4A is also called "Open Division" which just means the top level of competition.
It's probably super confusing to people not from Iowa, but I've grown up on these divisions, so they are totally normal to me. Public schools from Des Moines/Cedar Rapids/Davenport/Iowa City/Sioux City all compete in 4A always. Smaller rural schools like Emmetsburg always compete in lower divisions. Typically teams use their football classes for show choir classification.
Can someone explain what the different tiers are?? In MN we just do class A and class AA
According to the schedule, you do "2A," "3A," and "4A." Not sure what happened to 1A, or what the A stands for, or which order they go in just by looking at the names alone, but that's why we use tiers on the website.
They mean the same thing you're already used to, but allow us to have a sense of consistency from event to event. All you have to know is that Tier I is the top tier (using whatever method the competition uses to determine divisions: skill, school size, or choir size), and then it moves down from there. So Tier I is either the most advanced skill, or the biggest schools, or the biggest choirs. This is the case for every competition in our database, so when you go to look up a contest in a different state, you don't have to know what "4A," or "open divison," or "varsity" or "Class C" means - the tiers have already converted them for you.
A prep division is usually made up of more intermediate-level groups from a school that has another, more advanced choir. That's why we don't list them as another tier (Tier IV, in this particular case).
North Iowa Area Community College Border Bash 2016
My bad.
