If you attend our Tuesday online club on the Woogles platform, and we're very happy and thankful for your presence if you do, you'll notice there are many strong players with a lot of experience in the game - 10 years, 20 years, or even more in some cases. This is also true of everyone in the CoCo's leadership; it probably doesn't come as any surprise that we're passionate long-time Scrabblers ourselves.

But even the most experienced players among us remember being brand new at one time - trying to keep the two-letter words straight, or sitting down at our first club session and being a little nervous, or entering a tournament room and hearing the sound of thirty or forty tile bags being shaken at once. Or for some, maybe a lot of those early experiences with Scrabble happened online at one of the many sites or apps used for the game.

However we arrived, all of us found something special in Scrabble that has kept us coming back again and again. The game itself is a never-ending, multifaceted challenge, and that's certainly part of it; easy to learn, but a lifetime to master. But what I've heard a great many longtime Scrabblers say, and I would say this for myself as well, is that the chance to enjoy the game and competition with other like-minded people and the friendships they've made during their Scrabble journeys are the biggest reason they're still in the game.

I think I can speak for all of us here that we very much want the CoCo to be a place where all players can find the same sort of fascination that originally drew us to the game and has kept us playing for all these years. And that's true whether you're a longtime player at the highest levels of the game, or you just heard from a friend that competitive Scrabble is an actual thing and are curious to try it out - or absolutely anywhere in between.

One of the reasons I mention this is that while Scrabble played to the Collins word list is the norm outside of North America for all levels of play, within North America it has primarily been played by experienced expert players. There are understandable reasons why it's evolved that way, but I'd be very happy to see the CoCo successfully introduce North American Collins play to more players at every level of experience and skill. Wherever you are in your Scrabble journey, we want to offer playing opportunities that are fun and rewarding, as well as resources for you to learn and explore the game as deeply as your inner word freak would like. To accomplish this, we'll need to do a lot of listening to the player community, so any ideas you may have for us are very welcome - you don't have to be an experienced tournament player or have a high rating or anything like that to make a valuable contribution to what we're doing.

We're near to the beginning of our own journey as an organization, and, like an avid Scrabble player who has only been playing a short time, we have so much in front of us to learn and build upon, and we're excited and inspired by the challenges ahead!