Preparing to reopen live tournament play after COVID-19

It’s been quite a year. From the start of this pandemic, we have put the health and safety of our community first. We were excited to convene players from around the continent at nine live tournaments in 2020, but we recognized last spring that cancelling in-person gatherings was the best way to protect everyone. Since then, this virus has impacted us all. Many of us, including me, have lost friends or family members to COVID-19. Because we at the CoCo recognize that lives are at stake, we are cautious to emerge from this pandemic safely and to not put live tournaments back on the calendar before it’s prudent to do so. 

In the past year, we’ve proven ourselves to be a nimble and innovative organization. We quickly pivoted to hosting virtual tournaments and clubs while lockdowns and quarantines continued around the world. We’ve brought you 11 virtual tournaments - including BlitzChamps and the Virtual World Cup - and more than 30 virtual club sessions. In this tough time of social distancing, we’ve been glad to bring hundreds of players from more than 20 countries together to play Scrabble online.

We also know that virtual Scrabble can only go so far.

Like many of you, we miss playing Scrabble over the board and seeing friends in person. Our Board of Directors has been closely monitoring official public health guidance and data on COVID-19 - and with vaccination rates increasing and new cases declining in North America, we are now readily preparing for the day when we can gather again in person for fun and games. We hope you’ll bear with us as we transition our focus from virtual play to live, in-person tournaments. We are committed to hearing both your excitement and your fears, and to being as adaptable and resilient as we’ve been this past year. 

In preparation for our return to live tournament play, we have taken several steps to enable us to reopen in a deliberate and precautionary way. Here’s a summary of key steps we’re taking:

• We have developed, and our Board has adopted, a vaccination policy for in-person tournaments. Going forward, our directors will require players to be fully vaccinated to register for CoCo events. You can read the full details of how we are implementing this policy on our new COVID page.

• We have updated our Directors’ Handbook to guide directors on how to safely run in-person tournaments. These updates will ensure that players can show up at any CoCo tournament and have a consistent experience, secure in the knowledge that the director will run that tournament safely. Among other requirements, directors must provide hand sanitizer and abide by any local restrictions on masks, social distancing, and the size of gatherings.

• We have added a new section to both the Directors’ Handbook and the new Players’ Handbook with detailed public health and smart hygiene practices designed to minimize transmission of not just COVID-19, but other infectious diseases as well. Many of us have caught a cold at a Scrabble tournament, and these new steps aim to reduce that risk. One example is the use of personal word adjudication apps instead of having players all touch a common word judge computer.

• We are empowering our directors to take additional precautions to protect their players and communities based on local conditions and considerations. For example, a director may bar players from bringing guests to a tournament to minimize the number of people present, or may require that any guests be fully vaccinated.

We anticipate that we’ll be reopening in-person tournaments soon - and when we do, we will open registration for these events on our Tournaments page. To receive an email whenever we schedule a new tournament, you can join our mailing list. We look forward to seeing you over the board again - until then, stay safe and healthy, and please get vaccinated.