On attracting new tournament players and growing the game
I mentioned it in this space last week, but it bears repeating today - reflecting on the tournament that we held at our home in Seattle over the July 4 holiday weekend, I can't say enough about how cool it was to have three new tournament players join us for their very first in-person event.
We've had a bunch of Scrabble events at our place over the last five years or so, and we've grown accustomed to seeing many of the same familiar faces join us time and time again. So it's always refreshing to see a newbie in the mix, and it's even more so when we have three newbies - 30 percent of all humans! - in the field at once.
Welcoming Luke, Alex, and Joe into the fold went as seamlessly as could be. All three of them had a good familiarity with tournament Scrabble already, despite never having played it - they'd watched plenty of it on YouTube, they'd discussed it in various online fora, and they'd of course played a ton of virtual games before taking the plunge into their first in-person ones. All three of them were more than ready to dive into the tournament scene. They were champing at the bit.
Over the past week, this has gotten me thinking a lot about the growth of Scrabble. At the micro level, I've been reflecting on just how cool it is when you have a new player, or two or three of them, join you for the first time. Their energy and enthusiasm are always refreshing to see, and they can be infectious. But at the macro level, I'm also thinking about how little bits of growth like this can be scalable. How can we take the same approach that worked to attract three new players, then apply it to bringing in dozens? Hundreds? More?
I think, when you really start to dig into the nuts and bolts of the process, you see that we have a lot of the necessary tools in place already. A lot of them, I just referenced above, when discussing our new players in Seattle and their Scrabble backgrounds. We have a lot of Scrabble content online to pique people's interest. We have a constant stream of Scrabble buzz happening in various corners of the internet, like Discord and Reddit and what have you. We have platforms like Woogles where people can start playing games and get addicted. All of the gateway drugs, if you will, are readily available over the counter. The next step is to get people hooked on live, in-person Scrabble events.
A lot of what we're doing with this grand CoCo experiment is building out the infrastructure for that. We want to build a bigger base of regular tournament players in North America (and CSW players in particular, of course). For that to happen, we need to offer lots and lots of opportunities for both tournament and club play. We already offer some of both, but we're striving for a lot more. We want to build them, promote them, grow them, and help them to truly thrive.
All of this is hard work, but little victories like our July 4 tournament give me the optimism to keep plugging away at it. Not only did three new players join us for a tournament, but there's momentum building toward more Scrabble in the area soon. There's talk of resurrecting our long-dormant Seattle CoCo club. There's talk of more tournaments. All of a sudden, we're feeling energized about leveling up our local CSW Scrabble scene, doing bigger and better things with it. And if we can do that here in Seattle, well, we're not special. You can do it anywhere else, too.
Largely, it's just a matter of continuing to put in that work - running tournaments. Running clubs. Running these things and sustaining them and keeping players coming back again and again. It's work, yes, but for the sake of our game and its future, it's absolutely vital work. And we're always eager to find people who are ready to roll up their sleeves and get to work alongside us.