It's been almost three years now since the initial founding of the CoCo, but really, it's been just a hair over 12 months since we actually got moving in earnest. After laying low for much of the pandemic, we reopened our doors for in-person events on Labor Day 2021, and it's been full steam ahead since then.

During that time, we've gotten events off the ground everywhere from Portland to Seattle to San Diego to Austin to Boston to Minneapolis to Madison to Saint Louis to Chicagoland, and a bunch of places in between. And we're just getting started. The fall and winter months ahead will be action-packed, with plenty of events in locales both familiar and all-new. Exciting times await.

This is the main thing I work on for the CoCo. We have a large and diverse team with a lot of specialized skills, but my main area of focus is tournament strategy. When should we have events? Where should we have them? Who should run them? I'm constantly surveying the map, planning the calendar, coordinating with directors, and finding answers to these questions. And it's fun work. I enjoy taking a big-picture view of the Scrabble landscape and looking for ways we can make it better. The quest here, and it's a never-ending one, is to keep making the tournament Scrabble circuit bigger and more robust. For the first year and change, this effort has been largely successful, and all of us on the CoCo team are immensely thankful for all the directors who have played a role in that.

Perhaps the most gratifying part of this effort is all the brand-new tournaments our directors have built, from scratch, with their bare hands. Thanks to the ingenuity and hard work of our team, we've brought new events into the Scrabble world in 2022 that never existed before. Look at what Puneet Sharma and David Whitley did to create an event in beautiful sunny San Diego, or what Becky Dyer and James Curley did to bring Scrabble to downtown Austin. Look at Peter Armstrong bringing 10 Scrabblers together in a lake house in Wisconsin. These folks are putting new places on the Scrabble map. And every time they do, they're taking a significant step toward growing the game.

It's been thrilling to watch all of these directors succeed thus far. And as I look ahead to the next few months, I'm looking forward to more of those successes. I can't wait to see Mark Francillon make his directorial debut this weekend in Brattleboro, Vermont. Not long after that, we'll see Terry Kang in Slingerlands and Sandy Nang in Los Angeles unveil brand-new events. This is the stuff I live for. New tournaments, new places, new directors - you love to see it.

I say it all the time, but it bears repeating again and again until I'm blue in the face - tournament directors are the lifeblood of the Scrabble community. For our game to be successful, we need good people dedicated to running events. In all the work we've done to grow the CoCo, building our team of directors is the one thing I'm proudest of - and it's work I don't plan on stopping anytime soon.

If you're a director who's already gotten an event off the ground for the CoCo in the past year: A million thanks. You are awesome, and you make the Scrabble world go round.

If you aren't such a director yet, but you're maybe considering it: Do it! Maybe you have some sort of an idea that could blossom into a successful Scrabble tournament - a new city, or a new venue, or a new concept for a tournament format. Whatever you've got, take it and run with it. And if you want a little help, you can always turn to other members of our community for support. I know I personally would love to work with you on building a great tournament, and I'm sure others out there would lend a helping hand as well.

Directors of the Scrabble world, unite. We are the future of the game - so let's make it a bright one.