On building a big, international field for this summer’s Word Cup

It's been about a month since we last used this space to share the latest on the Word Cup Collins championship, our major event that's coming up this summer. Seeing as the tournament is fast approaching - now just a little over 4 months to go! - I figured you all were overdue for an update.

And the update is good! The CSW field for this summer's championship is steadily growing, we're pleased to report. We're now up to 67 total players, including 49 confirmed and 18 tentative, and that number is still climbing every day. We've blown past every benchmark we've set for ourselves. We needed 20 players to guarantee a $10,000 first prize; that was settled on the first day. If we got a little more than that, we planned to offer a second division; that now looks like a near certainty as well. This tournament is growing super fast. We're on track to hold one of the biggest, most exciting CSW tournaments ever held on American soil.

But here's the part I'm most excited about: Of all the players in this field, nearly one-third of them don't reside on American soil. They're coming to compete in the United States internationally.

Of the 67 people on the entrants list currently, 22 are from outside the U.S. They hail from eight different countries - Australia, Bahrain, Canada, India, Ireland, Nigeria, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom. And that's just the beginning. We're still early in the process, and I'm hopeful we can encourage much more international participation before all is settled in July.

This has always been a key priority for the CoCo as an organization. Keen observers of this blog may remember that, in fact, it was one of the very first topics we covered when we first launched this site back in late 2019. From the beginning, we've made it clear that embracing the international Scrabble community is an important step for any players' organization to take. And since then, the pandemic has only underscored that point. Throughout the last two years, as many Scrabblers have been confined to their homes, they've discovered the joy of being able to play anyone in the world online. The goal now is to take that excitement and channel it into more big things moving forward.

This doesn't just happen naturally. Like any relationship, the relationship between North American Scrabblers and the rest of the world takes effort. You reach out; you talk to people. You form bonds with people. Gradually, you encourage everyone in the Scrabble world to come together and play together. It's not necessarily easy work, but it's important work. After all, Scrabble may have been invented and popularized in the U.S., but that was 80-some years ago. Today, it's a global game. It's on all of us to shape a more global community.

The CoCo has been steadily working on this. We did it in 2020 with our Virtual World Cup event; we continued in 2021 with the World Blitz Scrabble Championship. Now, we're looking to do the same with an in-person event in 2022. This has been a major focus for us over the last few weeks - reaching out, engaging with international players, having conversations, asking questions, answering questions, and inviting people from all over the world to play with us. It's going well, but we're not satisfied yet. We still want to bring in more players. More, more, more.

So: If you're reading this from overseas and you want to play Word Cup, talk to us. If you're considering it, but you're not sure yet and you have a few questions first, talk to us. If you need a little help on our end before you can make the trip - like, with getting a visa for example - talk to us! We are here for you. We'll do whatever we can to help.

We're optimistic that this summer's Word Cup will be the best Collins tournament that North America has ever seen - and we want it to be the most international one ever, too. If there's anything we can do to help make that happen, just reach out. Let us know. We would love to hear from you.