Previewing this weekend in Vancouver, BC - and pondering Canada

There's a special occasion coming up in just a few days' time - well, it's special for me, anyway. It's time to dust off the ol' passport, head out to the ol' train station, and set out for a trip north of the border. Starting Saturday morning, we've got a 2-day CoCo event coming up in Vancouver, BC.

I'm excited to be there, as I always have been. In fact, I've been at every single event the CoCo has ever sanctioned in Canada!

...which would be impressive, except, well, there have only been two of them ever. What's coming up this weekend is the third. Very brief recap of Canadian CoCo history: We had a 1-day in Vancouver in the summer of 2023, then a weekend-long tournament shortly before Christmas in late 2024. That's it - that's the whole list. The event this weekend, a 14-game tournament that gets underway at 10 a.m. Saturday, will be our third foray into Canuck land.

I think we can all acknowledge the silliness of this. Let's just be real here. When a Scrabble organization that claims to serve North America - a region of the world that theoretically should include both the United States and Canada - has run 111 tournaments to date, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense that 109 have been in one country, compared to just 2 in the other. There's a little bit of an imbalance there, to say the least.

To be clear, we definitely want to sanction more tournaments in Canada. It's a major priority for us. That's an easy thing to say, though. It's much more difficult to achieve in real life. There are certain structural barriers there. From our founding, way back 7 years ago, there were pretty much exclusively Americans building our organization from the ground up, and we all got our start by running tournaments in our American backyards. While we've always had the desire to branch out from that starting point, and there have been little bits of progress here and there, it's mostly been pretty slow going.

But we're going to keep working at it. And weekends like this one, when members of our team have a chance to venture up north and connect with our Canadian neighbors, are a great opportunity to do that work. We have the chance to talk with people, sell them on our vision for a democratic, pro-CSW future for Scrabble, and encourage them to join our team. Eventually, we may be able to empower a few of our Canadian friends to run tournaments and run them successfully.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves, though. For now, we're just looking forward to this weekend. It will be great to have a weekend of Scrabble in Vancouver - or, rather, in the suburb of Burnaby to be precise. We've got a great venue in the local recreation center, a healthy field of 6 players signed up so far (with a couple more possibly in the offing), and a rock-solid new CoCo director in the director's chair. Chris Williams just got his CoCo certification last week, and he's ready to go. I know he's going to crush it.

So, short term, we're looking forward to an awesome weekend of Scrabble in Vancouver. I personally have my bags packed and my travel documents ready - I can't wait. And long term, our mindset is, we'd love to have a lot more weekends in the future like this one. We'll keep working on it.