Reminiscing about (and looking forward to) Memorial Day weekend

I remember my first Memorial Day in Scrabble like it was yesterday.

The year was 2008. I was a broke college student at the time, just barely scraping by, but I'd managed to save enough pennies in my piggy bank that spring to buy a train ticket from Boston to Philadelphia. I was excited for the holiday weekend tournament in Philly. I hadn't played many tournaments to that point, and the chance to play a long one - 19 games! - in a big venue in a major city packed with Scrabblers was quite the draw for me.

I can't tell you much about the games themselves from that weekend. I don't recall what bingos were played, or who gutted out what endgame against whom, or what have you. But what I remember is this: It was a weekend jam-packed with Scrabble, not just in Philadelphia but all over North America, and you could feel that in the air. It was palpable.

I remember going out to dinner on that Saturday night, after the first day of games, and hearing players all around me chattering about the day's happenings across the Scrabble world. One player even had this new high-tech thingamajig called an iPhone (those were brand new back in 2008!), and he was using it at the dinner table to check emails and log onto message boards and get updates from various tournaments.

There were events in Chicago. Dallas. Atlanta. Fort Lauderdale. Seattle. San Francisco. Montreal. Everywhere.

It seemed like just about everyone who was everyone in Scrabble was playing a tournament somewhere that weekend. And not only that, but they were keeping tabs on everyone playing elsewhere. We were all both Scrabble players and rabid Scrabble fans, glued to the action both across the playing room and across the continent. It made for an incredible sense of community. You weren't just a part of one division or one tournament - you were part of a massive culture of Scrabblers that was thriving all across the land. And when I say massive, I mean massive - the total number of players in all those tournaments was somewhere between 500 and 600. I'm not typically the "reminiscing about the good old days" type, but, man. Those were some good old days.

I would love to see Scrabble thrive like that again someday. Hustling, bustling holiday weekends with multiple big, exciting tournaments scattered all over - that's the good stuff. When you talk about growing the game, this is the kind of thing you're talking about. At times, that dream feels like it's a pretty long ways off - but, hey, any time you can take baby steps in that direction, it's a positive thing.

Anyway, we CoCo folks have two tournaments coming up this weekend. Two might not sound like much, but for some perspective, it's one more than the one we had last year, and it's two more than the zero we had in 2022. We're building something here, slowly but surely. Jennifer and I are hosting players right here in our backyard (literally, if the weather cooperates) in Seattle; budding superstar CoCo director Nits Chagti is running an event on the other side of the country, in the suburbs of D.C.

We're not exactly looking at 500-600 players this weekend - it looks like, if we're fortunate and no one calls in sick or anything, we might just squeak past 20, split between the two tournaments. But things could be a lot worse. We've got two fun events happening, two regions of North America where CSW play is thriving, and two little sub-communities where both the present and the future are bright.

We would love to have more of the above, obviously. We're always eager to see our little community of Collins enthusiasts put together more events in more places, helping to build a bigger and more vibrant scene.

For now, though: Let's enjoy these two tournaments. They should both be loads of fun. Happy tiling, from coast to coast.