An update from your Executive Director

Hello from your friendly neighborhood Executive Director! As the elected head of the CoCo, it's my job to advance strategic initiatives, make sure our bills get paid, and develop resources for players and directors. Much of my work happens behind the scenes, but today, I'm going to give you a look behind the curtain at some of the more significant efforts I've been leading.

Tax-exempt status

One of the CoCo's most important achievements this year was securing 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). It was not easy. The IRS was skeptical of mind sports and was on the cusp of denying our application. But I hired a nonprofit attorney who helped us clarify several elements in our application, including our commitment to providing learning tools and educational resources to our players. With the attorney's professional guidance, I amended our articles of incorporation and our bylaws and obtained approval from our board of directors, ensuring we would meet the IRS' tight deadline for reconsideration.

Yes, this may sound like bureaucratic minutiae, but here's why it matters. Now that we are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, donations to the CoCo are retroactively tax-deductible, all the way back to our date of incorporation in October 2020. This means that more of the money we receive goes directly to offering services and content to our players. In addition, we're saving our players and the organization money by qualifying for free and low-cost nonprofit business tools, such as Google Business Suite and Slack. And by qualifying for lower nonprofit pricing with PayPal and Stripe, we're able to pass savings on to you with every financial transaction, which means lower tournament entry fees for all players.

As an incorporated nonprofit, we were also able to obtain low-cost liability insurance. Insurance not only protects the CoCo, but also provides valuable peace of mind to tournament directors. When you direct an officially sanctioned tournament for the CoCo, you're covered by our insurance policy and all the protective benefits that come with it.

(Caveat: That's true unless you have a bouncy castle at your event, in which case we have to seek special coverage from our insurer. This was an actual question on our insurance coverage questionnaire. But please don't let that wrinkle stop you, as bouncy castles are awesome.)

Rapid ratings

When we launched the CoCo, we published information on our innovative Glicko-2 rating system. We know how exciting it is to see your shiny new rating after a tournament ends, and how excruciating the wait can be if the ratings take hours or days to post. To enable rapid rating of CoCo tournaments, I initiated a tech team collaboration to build out and streamline the original software we use to calculate ratings.

You won't have to wait long at all to learn your new rating after you play in a live CoCo tournament. Thanks to our digital results submission process and the coding efforts of Martin DeMello, we now have the tools to quickly compute and post new ratings within two minutes after the last game in a tournament ends. This technology is easy for non-coders to use and is freely available to any CoCo director who wants to rate their own tournament.

Anti-harassment and anti-bullying efforts

We continue to take a strong stance against harassment and bullying. To that end, I expanded the scope of our existing sexual harassment policy into a broader anti-harassment policy and explicitly incorporated bullying into our list of prohibited conduct. I also wrote a Players' Handbook and specifically called out bullying as conduct that we do not tolerate in our community.

COVID-19 policy

To make the return to live tournaments possible, I researched COVID-19 policies and practices in late spring of this year. I wrote a COVID policy that balanced the need for attention to public health and safety with the demand we were hearing from players to bring back live tournaments. I presented a proposal for our COVID policy to our board, and we had a thorough discussion of the pros and cons of different approaches.

In the end, the board decided to require vaccination for live tournament participants. We also chose to offer full refunds to players who medically withdraw from tournaments due to illness or a positive COVID test result, to make sure that players don't suffer financially or risk the health of others if they become sick.

Paperless tournaments

In response to some board members' interest in making our operations and tournaments more environmentally friendly, I asked legal team member Michael McKenna to research potential options. After discussion of the information that Mike assembled, our board decided to focus its environmental efforts on how we direct tournaments. To that end, we've taken first steps by eliminating paper from our tournaments. I took the digital results submission tools that we built for virtual tournaments and adapted them for use at live tournaments, with Martin's help.

Now that results submission has gone completely digital, we no longer have paper results slips, which raised the question of how players would designate blanks. Applying a bit of my arts and crafts skills, I developed reusable blank slips, so players could designate their blanks with a dry erase marker on a laminated slip. We've successfully piloted these new slips at three tournaments so far, and we look forward to reusing them at many tournaments to come.

(Tip for players: Twist the cap to uncap the marker when you're going to designate your blank. Don't try to tug the eraser off instead - that's just mean to the eraser!)

Newcomer discounts

In more financial news, one initiative I'm proud of is our Newcomer Discounts program. Becky Dyer and I worked hard to figure out how to structure this initiative to lower barriers to entry for players new to tournament Scrabble or new to the Collins lexicon.

By offering 100% free entry to new players, and a 50% discount to new Collins players, we hope to make it possible for any interested player to enjoy their first CoCo tournament. To support first-time players, I wrote a newcomers guide to orient them to the tournament scene. We have some exciting ideas for expanding these newcomer initiatives, and we're keeping diversity in mind as we think about what may come next.

The CoCo Play Store

In June, I built and launched the CoCo Play Store to provide a one-stop shop for tournament registration. For the first time in North America, players have a centralized, go-to digital platform where they can easily sign up for tournaments and pay entry fees using a credit or debit card or PayPal account.

For players, this platform offers a streamlined service to sign up for tournaments. Gone are the days when you needed to send PayPal payments or mail paper checks to individual directors. As a bonus to our directors, our centralized budget and entrants list management means that directors no longer have to keep track of who has paid or tentatively registered for their tournaments. We manage all of that information and money for them, freeing directors to focus on the fun and creative parts of running tournaments.

These efforts are a small sampling of the work I've undertaken in the past year to build the CoCo's foundation and plan for the future. As our organization moves forward, I hope you'll join us as a player, director, or elected leader. We always welcome your ideas, and I personally appreciate the players who have taken the time to provide feedback and suggestions on how we can innovate and better serve the needs of this special community.