Hello and welcome to my (not so) quick write up about the 2026 WGI Percussion season! For this project, I have gathered and created a database of all of the scores from the season in an effort to do some analysis and discover any interesting trends.
Some brief background, Winter Guard International (WGI) is the national governing body and competitive circuit for winter guard, indoor percussion, and indoor winds. With its roots as an “offseason” version of marching band and drum corps, it has grown into an activity all its own, with hundreds of groups and thousands of performers from around the world each season.
If you’re intrigued and and want to learn more about WGI, head here: What is WGI?
Otherwise, here’s the gist… From February to April, hundreds of indoor percussion groups (think drumlines) compete against one another performing a 5-7 minute show in a gym. These groups are judged and the scores are made publicly available. Being heavily involved in the marching percussion activity, along with being the data nerd that I am, I thought it would be fun and fascinating to compile all of these scores and and do some general analysis, along with a few deep dives along the way. I am excited to share this with the internet, both fellow band folks and non-band folks alike!
Alright, make sense? Let’s get into it.
What I thought was going to be uploading a few spreadsheets turned into quite the journey exploring database design, Python scripts, and visualization tools. The entire process can be broken down into three main steps:
Don’t care about all the yapping and just want to see some pretty graphs? Check out the dashboards available in Tableau Public:
[Creating the Database](https://tan-echium-310.notion.site/Creating-the-Database-34f107fe9e1580f98fd0ec6effd9bd39)
[Extracting the Scores](https://tan-echium-310.notion.site/Extracting-the-Scores-34f107fe9e158038b47ce27f7aadf9b0)
[Analysis and Findings](https://tan-echium-310.notion.site/Analysis-and-Findings-34f107fe9e1580c1af69c8ed94831cf1)