Classes, fees & scoring setup

Two tabs on your Manage page define the competitive structure: Classes & Fees (who competes against whom, and what it costs) and Rubric (how judging works). Both auto-save as you work — you'll see a little "Saved" timestamp — with a Save Changes button as a backstop.

Classes & Fees tab

Choose your class count basis

At the top, pick how bands are sorted into classes:

• Winds only (the most common), Winds + percussion, All marching members, or Excluding percussion — classes are assigned automatically from each band's member counts.
• AHSAA enrollment letter — pull the class straight from the school's classification letter (1A–6A).
• Manual — you assign every band's class yourself at registration time.

If middle-school bands compete, the Middle-school weighting buttons let 6th–8th graders count as a fraction of a member for classification.

Define the classes

Click + Add Class for each class. The order of the class cards is the order of the day: it decides the schedule's class-block sequence, the results pages, and the awards ceremony. Use the up/down arrows on a class card to move it — a class added later starts at the bottom, so if it should perform earlier (say, a second A-class block right after the first), arrow it up into place, then regenerate the schedule. Per class you set:

• Class name (e.g., "A", "3A", "Silver Small") and its Min/Max count range (or AHSAA letter codes in that mode).
• Superior ≥ and Excellent ≥ — the rating thresholds for this class. For example, if your festival awards only Division I and Division II ratings — a I for scores of 85 and up, a II for everything else — set Superior ≥ 85 and Excellent ≥ 0: no band can rate a III. Prefer the traditional three-rating scale? Superior ≥ 80 and Excellent ≥ 60 gives you I / II / III at the usual cutoffs. Caption ratings compare the caption's score with its own maximum, so 45 out of 50 uses the 90% rating. Numeric scores and the Overall rating keep their existing scoring rules.

Changing a cutoff before awards begin clears computed, ready, and certified status. Recompute the results, mark them ready, and certify again. Saving the same cutoff values keeps the existing review. Once awards begin, scores are published, or the competition is completed or cancelled, cutoff changes are refused; the editor explains that no class settings were saved. - Band cap — the most bands you'll accept in this class (blank = unlimited). Bands beyond the cap can be waitlisted. - Fees — turn on Tiered registration fees (off by default) to give each class its own price — bigger classes can cost more than smaller ones. Expand a class's Fees section and add a single row with no date for a flat per-class fee, or several rows labeled Early Bird / Regular / Late with "effective until" dates for date-based pricing on top of that; directors automatically see the price for the date they register. Leave the toggle off and every class uses the one flat registration fee set on the Settings tab.

Warning

You can't delete a class that bands have registered into (even a requested class on a pending application) or been scheduled in — the save keeps the class and tells you which ones were blocked. Move those bands to another class first (on the Registrations tab), then remove the class.

Divisions (optional)

If your event groups classes into brackets — Silver/Gold, Small/Large, morning/evening — switch on Divisions and add each one (it appears above the class list). Then, on each class's own card below, pick that class's division from the Division dropdown — one division per class. Divisions can drive the schedule (blocks per division) and award scopes (a Grand Champion per division).

Grouping classes into award brackets

Say your event crowns two overall champions — one among the smaller schools, one among the larger. Create two divisions (many events use names like "Silver" and "Gold"), assign your smaller classes to one and larger classes to the other, then add a Grand champion of division award for each on the Awards tab. The division winner is the highest final score across all of that division's classes.

Splitting an oversubscribed class

Say your smallest classification draws fifteen bands while every other class draws four or five — one Best in Class award for fifteen bands is a tough sell. Split class…, next to a class on the Classes & Fees tab, breaks it into two or more named sub-classes (many events name the halves after school colors, e.g. "A (White)" and "A (Purple)") in one step, instead of you recreating the class by hand and moving bands over one at a time.

The Split class… link always appears next to a class on the Classes & Fees tab, but it opens onto a gate page rather than the split form itself unless all of these conditions hold:

• Registration is closed, but competition day hasn't started. Splitting lives in the schedule-making window: the competition must be in its Registration Closed stage (or still Open with the deadline already passed). A draft competition, or one that's underway or finished, can't be split.
• Nothing is left Pending — every registration in the competition (not just this class) has been accepted, rejected, or waitlisted.
• Awards have not begun. Releasing the ceremony protects its classes and award configuration, including an unscored class. A stale split form cannot change the released packet.
• The class has no scores yet. Once judging has started, splitting would leave no way to tell which sub-class an already-submitted sheet belongs to.

If any of those isn't true yet, the page explains which one and sends you back to Classes & Fees — nothing is split until every condition clears. Once they do, open it and you'll:

• Name each sub-class (two to six of them).
• Assign every band currently in the class — including waitlisted ones — to one of the new sub-classes; accepted bands come pre-sorted evenly across them as a starting point you can override.
• Choose which of the class's own awards (like a class-scoped Best in Class) carry over to which sub-class, pre-checked and renamed to match — untick any you don't have a trophy for. For a perpetual award that already has recorded history, keep at least one sub-class copy checked — its year-over-year lineage transfers onto the first sub-class you keep it on, and unchecking every copy is refused so that history is never lost to an unticked box.

Confirming replaces the original class with the sub-classes you named: each inherits the parent's fee tiers, thresholds, and division assignment, and the bands and awards you routed land exactly where you put them. Only the first sub-class inherits the parent's schedule block-start anchor — the rest schedule normally alongside the other classes the next time you regenerate the schedule. This can't be undone automatically, so double-check the assignments before confirming.

Rubric tab

This is where you design the score sheet your judges will see.

1. Sections to judge — check off the sections: Band, Drum Major, Percussion, Color Guard, and so on, or add a custom one. Each section gets its own judge(s).
2. Configure each section:
   • Weight (%) — how much this section counts toward the overall score. A badge tracks your total; it must land on 100%.
   • Number of Judges and, if more than one, the Aggregation Rule (average them, add them, or drop high & low).
   • Captions — the scoring rows inside the section (Music, Visual, General Effect...), each with its Max points. Beside each caption sits an optional criteria description box — list what the judge should be listening and looking for, one item per line (Tone Quality, Intonation, Balance & Blend...). Judges see the list as an expandable Criteria note under that caption on their sheet.
   • Use sub-captions — optionally group a section's captions under weighted headings. Instead of one flat list, the section splits into sub-captions (say, Music Individual and Music Ensemble), each holding its own captions and carrying a percentage of the section score. The percentages must total 100%, and each caption is scored inside its sub-caption before rolling up. Most competitions leave this off — flat captions are the common case.
   • Counts toward overall composite — turn off for awards-only sections (like Drum Major) that shouldn't affect band placement.

Example: a traditional festival rubric

Many long-running festivals work like this: a panel of band judges scores every band, their scores are averaged into the band's overall score, and the auxiliary units — drum major, color guard, majorettes, percussion — are judged separately for their own trophies without affecting band placement. To build that:

• Band — set Number of Judges to 3 with the Average aggregation rule, leave Counts toward overall composite on, and set its Weight to 100%. The overall score is simply the three band judges averaged.
• Drum Major, Color Guard, Percussion, Majorette, Dance Line, Feature Twirler — 1 judge each, and turn Counts toward overall composite off. Each is a standalone award: the highest score in each class wins Best in Class for that section, but none of them moves a band up or down the placement order. Bands that don't field a unit simply aren't scored in that section.

Example: a weighted composite

If instead you want auxiliary performance to influence placement, leave Counts toward overall composite on for more than one section and split the weight. For example, Band 70% + Percussion 15% + Color Guard 15%: a band scoring 90 / 80 / 84 in those sections lands at 90×0.70 + 80×0.15 + 84×0.15 = 87.6.

Only weight sections every band fields

A section that counts toward the composite contributes zero for any band that isn't scored in it. In the example above, a band with no color guard tops out at 85% before a note is played. Keep optional sections (majorettes, dance line, feature twirler) as awards-only unless your event requires every band to field them.

Editing sections after bands register

Adding a section — or un-checking one and checking it again — changes which captions bands compete in, so every band that had already confirmed its captions is set back to Captions unconfirmed and must confirm again (check-in will prompt them). You'll see a note on save telling you how many. Renaming a section, changing its weight, and editing the captions inside it are all safe: confirmations survive those. Bands whose judges have started submitting sheets keep their confirmation either way.

Clone and forget

The rubric is the fiddliest part of setup — which is exactly why cloning last year's competition is so valuable. Get it right once, then Save as default template on the Settings tab, and every future year starts from it.

Award definitions (Outstanding Percussion, Grand Champion, perpetual trophies) live on the Awards tab — covered in Scores, awards & publishing.