What’s next for the CoCo?
In what's been an otherwise pretty blah 2020, these last couple of months have been a blessing. Rather than dwell on our misfortune, being quarantined at home and unable to see our friends in person or enjoy live Scrabble tournaments, we've spent our summer holding an exciting online event that attracted many of the world's top players and brought the whole global Scrabble community together. We're immensely proud of the work we did to make the Virtual World Cup happen, and we're glad that so many players and spectators enjoyed it as well.
Now that the VWC is in our rear-view mirror, we figure now is a good time to pause, step back, and take stock of everything. We ran a successful online Scrabble event, and that's great! But our overall goals behind founding the Collins Coalition extend far beyond just one online event. It's been a tumultuous year, what with the global pandemic and all, but we're doing everything we can to soldier on and keep building the Scrabble organization we envision.
Here's a rundown of where the CoCo stands as an organization - including our plans for online Scrabble, live Scrabble, and building out our governance structure as we move forward.
Virtual Tournaments
The pandemic brought tournament Scrabble screeching to a halt in the United States around mid-March, and we moved quickly to start offering virtual tournaments instead of in-person ones. We announced our first 1-day event on March 16, and before we knew it, we'd put on a series of five small tournaments between mid-March and early June. This emboldened us to try something bigger; hence the Virtual World Cup.
The VWC went well beyond our wildest dreams. We received a total of 140 entrants, and the viewing audience was huge. My mind is blown looking at the stats on the CoCo Twitch channel - since the pandemic began, we've racked up 208 follows, 6,392 views, 10,748 chat messages and 138,726 total minutes watched. It's clear that you all really enjoy not only playing in these events, but spectating as well.
My mind is racing with ideas for what we can do next. There are a lot of considerations to think about - should we do another team event next time, or a tournament for individual players? Should we again invite just the elite players from each country, or should we do something more inclusive? There are all sorts of possibilities, and I'm not sure yet what our next move should be. If you have opinions on this, I'm all ears.
In-Person Tournaments
When we launched the CoCo at the end of 2019, we were excited to get moving with a whole slate of tournaments across the U.S. and Canada. Hood River in February was our grand opening, to be followed soon after by events in Minneapolis, Saint Louis, the Oregon Coast, Kelowna, Charlottesville, Oakland, Seattle, and New York.
You all know what happened next - after Hood River, COVID-19 came and dashed our plans for the other eight events we hoped to run in 2020. As of today, all eight of the above tournaments are officially cancelled. We've made arrangements to postpone with all of the tournament venues, and all players have had their entry fees fully refunded.
This is obviously a huge bummer, but it's a necessity. As much as we love Scrabble, it's simply not worth the public health risk to attempt live tournaments right now, especially in the United States, where we frankly have failed miserably to get this virus under control.
Our hope is that a vaccine at some point in the coming months will make it possible to resume having tournaments again. If and when that happens, we'll try to return in 2021 with all of our original tournaments back on the calendar, plus a few others as well. Fingers crossed!
Building the CoCo
While we're not able to hold live tournaments right now, one thing we can do is begin building out a governance structure so we'll be ready to roll when tournaments resume.
The Collins Coalition began as just the two of us, myself and Jennifer, with a few others contributing here and there as advisors, tournament directors, web content creators, and so on. One of our big goals for 2020 was to flesh out the organization, putting people in official roles where they can really start to make their mark. The pandemic put a lot of those plans on hold, as we had to quickly scramble to create virtual tournaments, but now that our situation is stabilizing, we're ready to take a closer look at the CoCo's structure.
We introduced the basics of this structure back in January, but that was before we really had any momentum for growing the organization. Now, with enthusiasm for the CoCo rising both on this continent and overseas, we're excited to take the next step in building our leadership team and hold elections.
We'll be sharing more details on that process in the weeks to come. In the meantime, you can learn more about our governance structure and start thinking about whether you'd like to run for an elected position.
Despite the ongoing quarantine, these are nonetheless exciting times! Big things are coming for the CoCo. We hope you'll be a part of them.