Moving forward from Word Cup 2025

In a way, the end of a major championship event like a Word Cup feels like a fresh new start. The big, long, grueling thing is over. You enjoyed the ride, immensely, but once it's done, you can breathe a little sigh of relief that you've gotten through it alive... and you can wipe the slate clean and move on to whatever's next.

Having been through a few of these big tournaments now, as both a player and a director, I can say that the feeling is pretty similar from both perspectives. Whether you're competing in one of these events or running one, it's a stressful experience to slog through all 31 games, and it feels kinda refreshing to pack up your things, go home, get a hot shower, do some laundry, and move on with life.

And the sentiment is much the same from a CoCo leadership perspective, too. We put everything we had into Word Cup 2025. Our whole team was busy for months - planning the event, promoting it, recruiting players. Then the actual event was here, and my trusty co-director Nits and I ran the show. I think everyone involved enjoyed the journey, but oof - it was exhausting and all-consuming, to the point where it was difficult to save time or energy for anything else. Now that Word Cup is over, we can move on and start to think about what's next.

There are few things more exciting than a clean slate. With a new Scrabble season ahead of us, there's unlimited potential for us to achieve big new things. We're psyched for the future, both near and distant. We're ready to get into it.

We're looking forward to the rest of the 2025 tournament calendar. We're getting back into action right away, with a few events coming up over Labor Day weekend - a pair of 1-days in upstate New York, along with a big multi-day event on the other coast in Portland. Then I'm looking forward to an October weekend in my old hometown of Charlottesville, VA, followed by a few other things in late '25 that we can't share quite yet but hope to unveil soon.

We're looking forward to even more exciting events in 2026. Right now, the calendar includes two of the marquee CoCo events - Crescent City Cup in January, followed by the Hood River Open in February. In the months ahead, we'll start to flesh out that list and offer a bunch more tournaments all over North America.

We're looking forward to the next Word Cup, which we already announced at this past one. We'll be in Williamsburg, VA over the first week in August 2026, and we're looking forward to the best Word Cup yet.

We're looking forward, now that we've got a little more time to focus on such things, to making a whole lot of little improvements behind the scenes to our organizational structure. There are ways we can reshape our internal teams, bring in new volunteers to help with new projects, beef up our online store, enhance our social media presence, and maybe even rethink our whole overall strategy. These are all things we didn't have as much bandwidth for pre-Word Cup. Now, that changes.

And of course, we're also looking forward to planning a whole lot more tournaments for you all, the player community, to enjoy. We can't share everything just yet, but some plans are definitely in the works, and we'll let you know more when we can.

In the meantime, we hope to see you at a Scrabble tournament soon. It's a whole new season. Let's get into it.