Reflecting on our first two years
This website went live two years ago, almost exactly. It was the last Monday morning of 2019, just before New Year's Eve, and the time was right for us to make a big announcement. Or at least, we hoped it'd be big. After months of planning, we were ready to launch a new Scrabble organization. Our goals were ambitious - we wanted to revive the tournament scene, restore accountability and democracy in Scrabble, and unite people across North America behind the common purpose of playing Collins. It all began on that Monday morning.
We had no idea what to expect at first. Would people be open to the idea of a new players' organization? Would all of these values - accountability, democracy, Collins unity - truly resonate with people? Seriously, was this thing going to be viable at all?
We didn't know, but we were determined to give it our best shot. We put 6 tournaments on the calendar, we added another 3 a few weeks later, and we prepared for a busy 2020.
Then, of course, 2020 happened. Obviously, COVID-19 was a massive disruption to everything we had planned. You know what came next - we shuttered all our live tournaments, put our plans on hold, and worked quickly to devise entirely new plans. It was a scramble, to say the least.
But I'm pleased to say, with a little bit of creativity and agility and a lot of hard work, the CoCo as an organization was able to accomplish a lot in 2020 and '21, despite all the roadblocks in our way. To name a few highlights:
With live tournaments no longer an option, we pivoted quickly to virtual ones. We held a series of small 1-day events during the spring of 2020, then ramped up to larger online tournaments, including two marquee events - the Virtual World Cup and the World Blitz Scrabble Championship.
Starting in late 2020, we also opened up a virtual club, allowing Collins players from all over North America and overseas to get together on Tuesday nights and play.
We worked hard to strengthen our organizational framework behind the scenes. We created a tournaments team, a legal team, and a finance team. We elected and began convening our first board of directors. We incorporated the CoCo as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. We revamped our financial infrastructure, creating a single unified system for managing all CoCo funds.
Once vaccines started rolling out and the pandemic situation began to improve, we pivoted back to live tournaments. We authored a COVID-19 policy to ensure the health and safety of players and directors, then began putting events back on the calendar for 2021 and '22.
As of this writing, we've held 4 live tournaments since reopening this fall - one each in Lincoln City, Portland, Charlottesville, and Seattle. We've got another 6 events planned for the first part of 2022, and another 6-8 events in the works, to be introduced sometime next year. It's official - we're up and running again.
These are exciting times. I'm really happy with the momentum the CoCo has built up - our organization is really growing. I'm steadily seeing more and more interest - from players, from directors, from other volunteers - in being a part of what we're doing. Two years ago, we had no idea this would be possible, but we now know that it is.
And none of it could have happened without the support of the Scrabble community. There are tons and tons and tons of people who have made contributions along the way to help build the CoCo. There have been numerous financial contributions, first of all, and we're incredibly grateful for everyone who's donated money to our cause over the last 24 months. But the contributors don't end there - not by a long shot. They include our initial slate of tournament directors, who had enough faith in our mission to be involved from the very beginning: Conrad Bassett-Bouchard, Randi Goldberg, and Scott Jackson. They include our first board members: Conrad, Becky Dyer, Peter Armstrong, Geoff Thevenot, Steve Pellinen, and Puneet Sharma. Then there were the live tournament directors who came on board in 2021 (Puneet, Pete, James Curley, David Whitley) as well as the directors of our online club (Becky, Geoff, Pete). We had help from technical people (like Martin DeMello), legal people (like Mike McKenna and Mary Goulet), and finance people (especially Pete, who does an incredible amount of work behind the scenes to manage the CoCo's money).
And finally, perhaps most importantly of all, we're thankful for you. Yes, you! To anyone out there who's engaged with the CoCo in any way - be it by playing, directing, volunteering, or just following along with our coverage online, I want to say thank you, truly. Launching a successful Scrabble players' organization has been a massive team effort, and I'm grateful for every single person who played a role on that team, large or small.
In short, it's been an awesome first two years, and I'm endlessly thankful to everyone who helped make it all possible. I'm psyched for the next two. Let's get after it.