COB this year was overall a fun time for my team and I. It was most of the dancers' first time competing, so a lot of people did not know what to expect. Most of the points from above are all true: hotel was great, mixer was mediocre at best, venue was nice, etc etc..
The problems with this competition began from the moment we were selected to compete because there was an immediate lack of communication. I had asked about 5 different times in the GroupMe with our liaisons about who the judges were, and every time I was either ignored entirely or told that they did not know the answer to the question (and ignored me when I asked them to check in with the board). I ended up having to consult with a non-affiliate of the competition, who's a dancer and close friend on Boiler Bhangra. He told me (correctly so) that there had been a separate group me with captains and the judges since the teams accepted their spot at the comp. I was quite frustrated about this, as were the captains, since they only ended up being added in less than one week before the comp itself.
The communication problem persisted once we reached the comp. Our captains had been informed that transport would be provided for teams who were flying in (see below),
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so we did not rent any cars or anything. We were given the two liaisons with cars (one had a 7-seater van and the other had a 4-seater sedan) since the hotel and practice rooms/venue were about a 10 minute drive apart. It started off smoothly, but since we had 15 people with us, we had to make multiple trips since it is not possible to squeeze 15 people into 2 cars with all of our equipment. The liaisons became less and less helpful as the day progressed, since they wanted to avoid making that extra trip at all costs. At one point, one of our liaisons was running an errand for us across the street from the hotel at Walmart, and the other outright refused to make the extra trip. This led to a delay for us, which was annoying, but we still worked around it.
On Friday we needed a total of 6 trips (3 to the practice room and 3 from it). We practiced until about 1:30 am since the mixer ran late and captains meeting only got done at 11. One of the liaisons stuck with us for a good amount of it and helped one of our managers pick up pizza and miscellaneous supplies from walmart. However, the other liaison left us and said he would be back in 20 minutes, and did not return for almost two hours. We had no idea where he went, and we ended up waiting extra time after practice for him to show up. We got pulled over on the way back to the hotel, which delayed us even more. Again, we were not particularly upset about this at the time. The next morning, he told us he had left to smoke weed with his friends and then drove us high. Thankfully the officer who pulled us over didn't catch him for driving under the influence but thats a risk that should not have been taken in the first place especially in a state like Indiana.
Saturday, we needed rides to and from tech time, and then to and from the practice room/venue before/after the comp. This was when one of the liaisons completely refused to come back to pick some of us up since he said had already made enough trips. So, we ended up getting delayed when leaving from our tech time back to the hotel to eat lunch since the other liaison took a while to come back. The liaisons then started getting annoyed with us after we did not leave on time for the practice room in which we were getting ready before the comp. Again, we understood their frustration and made our best efforts to haul ass out of the hotel. After the competition, one of the liaisons told us she could only make one trip as she had a meeting to go to, so all but 4 of us had to arrange ubers to get back to the hotel. The other liaison was not to be heard from after this as well, until I ran into him at the afterparty. I had left my jacket in the practice room which had my wallet in it as well and my message went ignored in the groupme, unsurprisingly. I had to ask my friends from Illini who had a zipcar to drive me over there.
Eventually, we made it back to the hotel, where the liaison coordinators came into our hotel room to yell at us for "treating our liaisons like a cab service". We were pretty shocked throughout this entire thing since we were trying to minimize the amount of trips taken. Again, we only took trip to and from the venue except for two other trips all weekend. They did not seem to care about the fact that they literally told us they'd arrange transport through our liaisons, and continued to talk down to the team, even though most of our dancers have been liaisons for Blowout and understood how to treat liaisons with respect.
COB is not a competition I would recommend to any team that is not from the area. It was clear that the liaison coordinators had absolutely no idea what they were doing. When COB changed its name from Boiler Bhangra to cover up its past fuck ups they clearly had no intention of being more considerate or respectful to teams who attend. The board has to realize that it's the teams, not the competition itself, that gives COB any legitimacy as a comp; without the teams like those who competed this past weekend, the comp would crash and burn.
