Six of eight on Spirit of Atlanta's design team return. The 0.8 lost in General Effect Visual is theirs to win back
Six of the eight names on Spirit of Atlanta's 2027 design team were on its 2026 team. At 2026 Finals the corps finished 10th, 1.537 points behind Colts, and the two effect captions accounted for 1.0 of that gap, 65 percent, led by General Effect Visual. The bet is continuity, and there is a clear test for whether it pays.
Spirit of Atlanta finished 10th at the 2026 DCI World Championship Finals on August 8, scoring 88.588. Colts, one place ahead in 9th, scored 90.125. The gap between the two corps was 1.537 points.
Two captions make up General Effect: Visual and Music. Weighted for how DCI scores effect against execution, those two captions accounted for 1.0 of the 1.537-point gap, 65 percent of the margin separating Spirit of Atlanta from the corps directly ahead of it.
The caption that cost the most
General Effect Visual scored 17.1, 10th in the field. Against Colts, that single caption is worth 0.8 of the 1.537-point gap once the weighting is applied. General Effect Music added another 0.2. No other caption area comes close to that combined 1.0.
How the numbers are weighted
The two General Effect captions carry 40 of a possible 100 points. The six performance captions split the other 60. A tenth of a point moved in General Effect is worth two tenths moved in a caption like percussion or color guard. Every weighted figure in this piece uses that scale. The caption marks printed on their own, 17.1 and 18.05, are shown the way the recap sheet prints them, unweighted.
Who is back, and what changed
Spirit of Atlanta announced its 2027 design team on October 3, in a post titled "Introducing the 2027 Spirit of Atlanta Design Team." The team includes Michael Martin as artistic director and brass arranger, Josh Nelson as program coordinator, Giles Ouellette as visual program coordinator, Richard Hinshaw as visual designer, Daniel Wiles as a design consultant, Korey Craven as color guard designer, Adam Wiencken as battery arranger, and Andy Filipiak as front ensemble arranger and sound designer.
Six of those eight were on the 2026 team, by the corps' own announcement of that team on September 26, 2025: Martin, Hinshaw, Wiles, Craven, Wiencken and Filipiak. The two visual designers whose program produced the 17.1, Hinshaw and Wiles, are both back. Two names do not appear in the 2026 announcement: Josh Nelson, now program coordinator, and Giles Ouellette, now visual program coordinator. One 2026 name is not on the 2027 list: Bradley Klemmensen, announced in 2025 as returning for his second year as visual designer.
General Effect Visual is not a separate staff position. DCI judges it as a derivative of how the whole visual program reads, so the people positioned to move that number are Ouellette, Hinshaw and Wiles: two returning designers and a visual program coordinator who is new to that title.
What would prove this wrong
Keeping the visual designers is a bet that the 2026 program was close, and that the ground lost in General Effect Visual can be made up without changing who designs it. Two results next season would say the bet missed.
If General Effect Visual still trails the corps ahead of Spirit of Atlanta by a similar weighted margin at 2027 Finals, continuity did not close the gap this piece is built around. If the corps gains ground in percussion or color guard while General Effect Visual stays flat, the improvement came from somewhere other than the caption the returning designers own.
Neither result exists yet. The corps named the team about ten months before the next Finals, and no score can test the call until then.
Sources
- Introducing the 2027 Spirit of Atlanta Design Team · 2026-10-03
- Spirit of Atlanta 2026 design team announcement · 2025-09-26