<p>Keep in mind that coaches rep students who are auditioning for MT and straight acting. In the case of the coach with 7 at TSU, they may not all be MTs.</p>
<p>Excellent point MTTwinsinCA, I believe only 2 of the 7 are for MT.</p>
<p>Thanks for that information MTDad1994. I was a bit shocked by that number!
This makes much more sense.</p>
<p>In response to post #23, VT has some great and valid points.</p>
<h1>1 happened to my D at her very first audition. It threw her and annoyed her frankly.</h1>
<p>We did not use a coach and she spent all of her free time getting her type dialed in by talking to performers she respects; selecting vocal pieces that were good for her vocal range, age, and castable type; and lastly, researching and reading plays, plays, plays…even when there wasn’t really extra time to do it…I won’t dwell on how busy this girl was.</p>
<p>She HAS had the opportunity to attend a Performing Arts HS and with all her Conservatory classes there, her private voice, private dance, and theatre experience, she appeared polished without a coach. She is especially comfortable with interviews and included them whenever possible.</p>
<p>Similar to preparing for a job interview, after we worked together to narrow down her college list, the ownness was on her to educate herself about the college and the program, and take responsibility for her own material. It worked for her and because she knows how to do all of this, I think she is that much more prepared to begin her college MT journey.</p>
<p>The thought of using a coach never crossed my mind even after I read Mary Anna’s wonderful, and very helpful book. For our situation, the money was better spend on the audition trail!</p>
<p>Good luck to all beginning the process. This site is so incredibly helpful too.</p>
<p>MrsDrz, I can see how someone with the advantages your daughter had wouldn’t need a coaching service the way we did. Congratulations to her and you and best of luck. </p>
<p>You do have to analyze the best way to allocate your resources, if they are limited, as most of ours are. Most of us have limited money: we ALL have limited time. We could have probably visited several more schools for the money we spent on coaching but what would have been the point of being embarassingly unprepared for 20 auditions instead of 10? lol. On the other hand if you are ready, and are polished from years of previous study and are able to find your own material and familiar with the schools so you can come up with a good list, then the only thing really a coach could add would be an extra pair of hands to help with finding stuff and one more person on your team, which is always a good thing, especially as expert as our coaches were, and while I think those things alone do justify the expense if you can do it, I would probably in your shoes have chosen to expand our audition trail too, as you did.</p>
<p>^^^yes, each person’s situation is unique for sure and I feel badly for kids that haven’t had a lot of opportunities AND don’t have the finances for a coach. We know SEVERAL families that used coaches and are very pleased with money well-spent. I talked to several parents at auditions whose kids spanned the gambit, from extremely prepared due to HS training and not prepared at all. Surprisingly, each that I got contact information from has a child who got in somewhere! Yeah.</p>
<p>I am now enjoying this time helping those “incomings” prepare in the best way they can. So many here on CC helped me in more ways than they know in the overall organization process.</p>
<p>My regret is that we personally had to spend money on auditioning around the country. I wish more schools would have participated in Unifieds. Though we DID use many frequent flyer miles and Marriott hotel points, thankfully! I would have much rather done a family trip to Europe this summer : /</p>
<p>Best!</p>
<p>I’ve started and then deleted many comments to this thread and realized, I actually have no idea what “don’t have the finances for a coach” really means both mathematically and in practice. Aren’t these kids all coached in one way or another and are we not paying as we go?</p>
<p>We didn’t hire a national coach either but I just did the math. Between hours spent with the regular voice teacher on college audition songs selection and cuts, a group class in “college audition prep” that focused on monologue selection, some drop in dance classes that certainly did not make my daughter a trained dancer and about 4 hours of a private choreographer to help make a dance sample that we could film for a prescreen requirement since we didn’t have any previous dance footage that we could use… we spent just under $2,000 ($1,755 to be exact including dance) on our “brown bag lunch” version of preparing that admittedly was filled with more gourmet treats than PB&J. Perhaps it could still be done for less. Anyone?</p>
<p>How does that compare? My daughter did not attend a performing arts high school so did not have access to resources and expertise at that kind of an institution. Would I consider her coached or uncoached? Not sure. Coached I guess but not by one of the well known national full service coaches and outside of the college audition prep class, no time was spent on Q&A for the interview. Also no time was spent on picking colleges to apply to. That we did on our own.</p>
<p>Should this discussion be its own thread as an alternative to the excellent info here on coaching services which I’m gathering really is about the nationally known, full service variety?</p>
<p>I really do not feel we spent money for “coaching”. While my D did take voice lessons in high school, along with piano from the time she was very young, we never paid for them with the intent of preparing her for college auditions. Rather, we paid for them with the intent of exposing her to the arts. Her voice teacher did not help her prepare for auditions, except for working on songs of her choosing in the same way he worked on any of her choices. Her dance was primarily taken thru our community college and high school, all at no cost. Her acting and stage experience was done thru our local Regional theater at no cost to us- in fact they paid her. I feel as if we got out of the audition process at very little cost- she auditioned at the local LA Unifieds so avoided hotel and travel costs- compared to our current high school junior who plays club soccer with the intent of playing college soccer. We have spent MUCH more on him with his club and travel costs. </p>
<p>Yes, I think our minimal costs result in a large part from our location in the country. We are very close to a lot of resources and opportunities that many kids do not have available. We did not feel it was necessary to spend a lot to prepare for college auditions. However, I have no doubt that if we lived in an area without the resources we have, we very well might have found it necessary to use more coaches. In the end, you just have to do whatever you think is necessary to prepare for college auditions and it is going to be something different for each person.</p>
<p>Adding on to my earlier posts in this thread, I want to say that in the case of the coach we used, Mary Anna Dennard, she offers services to suit every budget. From simply buying her book, which costs about $15 and is chock full of info, up to private coaching. Additionally, she recently launched a new suite of online options that are very affordable and weren’t available when we started last year. I say this because there is a lot of concern in this thread over the cost of private coaching. Just know that even if private coaching isn’t in your price range (and that obviously varies based on each family’s individual needs) there are options out there. One avenue I would propose is asking your high school counseling office to subscribe to the online service – it might be a resource, like a “Naviance” for performers – that they’d like to have in house. Lastly, I know that Mary Anna takes 7-10 students a year for private coaching on full scholarship. Again, just want you all to know there are many options out there and you mustn’t dismiss coaching or college audition resources altogether simply because of finances.</p>
<p>I’ll also share that in our case, over the long run, working with Mary Anna may have even saved us money, because she helped streamline my boys’ list of schools and helped map out an audition plan so that we limited the amount of travel we had to do from Los Angeles. Left to my own devices, I would probably STILL be flying those boys around! 
I jest, but there is truth in my joke. We probably avoided at least one, if not two, cross country trips thanks to advice from our coach.</p>
<p>Also forgot to mention that Mary Anna also hosts a private early audition weekend in November in Dallas for her students, with about 12 schools. My S’s couldn’t attend last year due to their fall musical at school but THAT would have saved a lot of time and travel to have quite a few schools in one spot early in the season. In our case, participating might have eliminated our need to go to at least one East Coast campus audition and to Chicago Unifieds.</p>
<p>Wow, a whole lot of free advertising going on around here.</p>
<p>Honestly, I have no horse in this race since my boys are done. Just trying to clarify options. There are many good people out there – I encourage everyone to do their research and wish all the 2013 students much success! :)</p>
<p>I agree that no one responding to this thread was trying to steer business to a specific person or group. You ask for our experiences, and we give them. What I love about this group is that the responses appear to be given in the spirit of helping each other succeed. It would be easy to keep all this stuff “secret” so your kid would not compete with my kid. But I thoroughly enjoy hearing about everyone’s successes and hope to give advice that promotes that success.</p>
<p>theatremomma, exactly. I am not getting anything out of recommending our coach. We don’t have any more kids so it’s not like I’m expecting a deal for “free advertising” or anything like that, I have no horse in this race anymore as my D is where she is going to be and I don’t get anything out of recommending or helping other people except for helping out my daughter’s future “competition”. But this is an amazingly generous and open group here - I’ve never gotten anything but the most warm and helpful wonderful support from everyone and there’s just an ethic to pass that on.</p>
<p>If I’d been unhappy with the coaching we got I would have made a point to caution people, but that wasn’t our experience.</p>
<p>I’m so grateful to read everyone’s experiences on all sides. For those of you who did use a coach, may I ask when you feel is the best time to start? My D is a rising sophomore. She will be attending OCU’s 2 week program this summer, but other than her regular voice lessons, that’s really the first dip of her toe into the larger pool she will be entering soon.</p>
<p>Junior year? Earlier? What would you all suggest? Thank you so much!</p>
<p>MTandbassmom, in answer to your question about starting coaching: If your daughter is already doing voice lessons, and you are satisfied with what she is doing, and is involved in some type of theater/drama program at school or elsewhere, I think starting junior year is perfect. You could start with having them work with your d for a short bit, then looking at schools and making a list that would fit her so you could travel to the campuses that year. Then in spring and over summer she could do more intensive monologue and song coaching. My daughter had no idea how to access her mix/belt and no one near was available that really had been trained in that, so she worked all winter junior year on, on Skype with MTCA vocal instructors that were amazing and whose methods were highly approved of by my d’s classical voice teacher. We have numerous friends in our state who did the same and all the kids were accepted at schools of their choice.<br>
To address the 'advertising 'issue mentioned above. I have been a strong proponent for MTCA on this forum, NOT because there is anything for me or my daughter that comes out of it, but because without them we would have been nowhere, and we now feel we are part of their big MT family. We want others to be able to access the same benefits we did and not go into this crazy endeavor unprepared!</p>
<p>Definitely start beginning of junior year. Don’t wait until senior year…</p>
<p>Junior year would be ideal. We had no clue about any of this until the summer before senior year and we just barely scraped in there on time. The coaching services get booked up fast and it gets frantic to find coaching slots so if you are up against tight deadlines and having trouble booking coaching times (all the coaches are working actors and they do get jobs! and have to book coaching around those times - which they are wonderful and dedicated about doing but there’s only so many hours in a day) it is that much more stress.</p>
<p>Starting any earlier I think would be a waste of money unless you just have tons to burn. What you need earlier is to be working on your basic dancing and singing skills, and acting if possible (we have been told that colleges don’t expect anyone to have had much acting training, not like voice or dance) and GETTING THOSE GRADES and test scores top notch as grades = scholarship money. </p>
<p>If you have your school list and songs and monologues figured out by the time the senior year starts, you could get away with just minimal coaching support that year (just enough to help with the big auditions if you are going to them, do mocks, and not get rusty - it’s not good to over coach either) and maybe have a bit of breathing space. It is tough that year - then with the tendency of many high school theater teachers to give their seniors the lead roles in the school plays (do they not REALIZE??? ugh) if that happens you might be more able to not have to make the difficult choice to turn that down in order to have time to prepare for auditions. We did squeeze it all in. It was hard. My D paid the price in her health that year.</p>
<p>My D started in December of her junior year and that seemed perfect for us. She did manage though to do a fair amount of coaching though her senior year and felt it helped her with her auditions. I don’t recommend slacking off of the coaching. It kept her sharp for her auds and kept up her confidence.</p>
<p>With all the focus on odds on these threads I am very curious about the numbers of kids using coaches vs. going it alone. And by coaches I suppose I mean MTCA and Mary Anna. Most everyone probably has some kind of voice, drama, or dance teacher help. This coaching goes way beyond that and is targeted at successful college auditions specifically. List. Outfit. Essays. Hair. Headshot. Etc. I’m guessing it’s a big number.</p>