The thing about New Year's resolutions is they're incredibly easy to make, yet far more difficult to stick to. It's an old cliché that January is the busiest month of the year at every gym - millions of people tell themselves at the start of the year that they're determined to stay fit, and they start the year working hard toward that goal. But check back in and see whether those millions are still showing up come May, and you might be disappointed.

Having said all that: A good resolution, if you really stick to it, can be a great thing! Whatever you resolve to do better in your life - be it losing weight, reading more, getting ahead in your career or your studies, spending more time with family or friends, you name it - it can make a real difference if you pull it off. If you set tangible goals and hold yourself accountable for really achieving them, you can make serious self-improvement a reality.

That's true for individuals, and - plot twist! - it's true for Scrabble organizations as well.

As for us at the CoCo, we're finishing up our third full year as an organization, and we're raring to go for our fourth. Here's a look at a few big-picture goals we'll be looking to achieve in 2023.

Continue running our most beloved tournaments

Take a look at the tournament calendar we have so far for 2023, and you'll notice a few classic player favorites already in the lineup. We're a few weeks away from the 11th annual Crescent City Cup (though the first under the CoCo banner). Not long after that, we have our fifth Hood River Open. Later in the spring, the second annual Austin Tile X-Words (ATX) event awaits.

These are some of the most anticipated tournament weekends of the year for many players across North America. These beloved events are our bread and butter, and we want to do everything we can in 2023 to help them thrive.

Launch exciting new tournaments

This weekend brings our first-ever New Year's event, in sunny Southern California. Later in the year, we're excited to launch the Champions Cup, another new tournament that features only the best of the best in North American Scrabble.

This is the kind of thing we want to do more and more of, in 2023 and beyond - creating new tournaments from scratch that players will come to know and love. There's certainly plenty of demand out there for fun tournaments, all across North America, and we're going to do everything we can to meet it. To that end, we've got a few more tournament ideas in the works that you'll learn more about soon.

Keep emphasizing online Scrabble

Running online tournaments and clubs started out for us as a pandemic experiment - there was no other way for people to get together and play during 2020 or early 2021, so we met up virtually, first on ISC and later on Woogles. But online play has become much more than that. It's a great way to build a sense of community among players - people can meet up and play regularly, from anywhere in the world, and there's almost no barrier to entry.

We've had a weekly club running on Woogles for almost two years now, and we're immensely proud of it. It's enabled players and directors to stay connected, it's been a great pipeline to introduce new players to serious Scrabble, and it's given players some riveting competition along the way. Plus, it's fun! We're excited to keep on Woogin' in 2023.

Create more interesting content

This is a pet project of mine. I've always believed that online content - be it articles, videos, social media posts, whatever - is a great way to market your brand and keep people interested in what you're doing. This is especially true in our line of work, as Scrabble players have a voracious appetite for media about other Scrabble players, games, and tournaments.

We've certainly done some work in this area in the past - including publishing these blogs, creating tournament streams and video archives, and putting up the occasional update on our social media accounts. But there's always room for improvement, no doubt. We'll work on it next year.

Keep nurturing great directors

I'll keep repeating it until I'm blue in the face: Directors are the lifeblood of a Scrabble organization. And the CoCo team has been blessed with some great ones. As we mentioned in this space last week, 17 different people helped run tournaments for us in 2022 - and many of them were first-time directors creating new events from scratch.

This is crucial to growing the game. It all starts with putting tournaments on the calendar, and to make that happen, you need capable people at the helm of each event. We'll do everything we can this coming year to both empower our existing team of directors and recruit new people to come on board.

Bring in more players

Speaking of growing the game, there's enormous potential right now to bring more people into our tournament-playing community. Scrabble is obviously a beloved game. It's been reported that 3 out of every 5 households in America own a set. And yet only a tiny, tiny fraction of those at-home Scrabblers are taking the plunge into tournaments. There are millions out there who might love to play with us - if only they gave it a try.

At the CoCo, our mission is twofold. We want to bring more people into tournament Scrabble at large, and we also want to encourage more Scrabblers - new and established players alike - to try Collins. This is easier said than done, but it's important to us. We'll do all that we can.

Stay true to our values

It's easy to lose sight of this now, three years later, but the CoCo was originally founded with two core values in mind - one, advocating for increased adoption of Collins Scrabble play in North America; and two, offering an environment where all players can feel safe and welcome to play Scrabble, without fear of harassment. We looked at the landscape and saw that no organization with these values yet existed, so we built one from scratch.

These values remain integral to everything we do. We've been sticking up for them again and again over the last three years, in a variety of ways. Some are large; others are small. Some are public; others happen behind the scenes. All are important to us. We intend for it to stay that way in 2023 and beyond.

Unveil a big Collins championship

There's one major goal that still lies ahead for us: Hosting a major championship event that's all Collins, all day, as far as the eye can see. This isn't something North America has seen in a long, long time, but we think it's just about time to make it a reality.

So stay tuned. More to come...