Directors’ Meeting at Nationals

Notes by John Fultz

Director's Meeting at the National SCRABBLE Championship in Dayton, Ohio, August 2, 2009.

About 35 people were in attendance, and the meeting lasted about an hour and a half. The meeting was facilitated by Mary Rhoades, John Chew, and Andy Saunders. Notes were taken by me. If you were at the meeting and feel anything in the notes misrepresents or incompletely summarizes what you said, please feel free to contact me and correct my mistakes!

Club Expert Point Certificates

Mary Rhoades (MR): Certificates come in PDF and Word files. Not yet available online (will be soon), but can be obtained directly from me via email [mrhoadestx@gmail.com]

Club Meeting Places and Tournament Locations

MR: Surveyed club directors about meeting places, including some very interesting ones (for example, a CVS pharmacy).

[General discussion mentioning condo rec rooms, senior citizen centers, village halls.]

MR: No best night for holding meetings came from survey results. For tournament locations, one thing that's come up is that schools can have prohibitive insurance requirements.

Thomas Tremont (TT): Meetup.com looks interesting.

M. Schroeder (MS): We tried this, but people who showed up were principally interested in socializing.

John Chew (JC): Found the cost of Meetup prohibitive.

Publicity

JC: Somebody asked today about having a convenient business-card-sized NASPA thing to hand out to potential new members. Will try to do this next week.

MR: My son started a Facebook group called "Scrabble Grandma".

Getting and Keeping New Club Players & Dealing with Difficult Players

TT: Snacks work.

MR: Has anybody had to kick somebody out of their club before?

Ted Rosen (TR): Many years ago, ejected somebody from the club who was rude and engaged in cheating-type behavior.

MR: Had an issue with a player who was older and losing mental faculties to the point that opponents didn't want to play her. Came up with the idea of partnering somebody lower rated with the player in a game.

Ted Gest (TG): Dealing with players who don't take the game as seriously, try as much as possible to pair them with lower-rated players.

MS: Not many people seemed to have listed their clubs on the Casual Club list as "challenging".

[Most people didn't know that such a designation existed.]

TT: Tried contacting local casual clubs to scout for people who might be interested in joining the NASPA club.

MR: Also, school clubs listed on the NSA site are good source of recruits.

Joyce Spalding (JS): What about people who don't want to use clocks?

[General discussion about how using clocks makes running the club much easier.]

Code of Conduct

MR: How many people have read it? [Many raised their hands.]

MR: John Robertson wrote it for us.

John Robertson (JR): Based upon the men's tennis tour code of conduct. Took the idea about official warnings and escalation of penalties from that code and adapted them for SCRABBLE. Got great feedback from about six people around the country and incorporated that.

Dan Stock (DS): Got feedback that pointed out that the very existence of a code of conduct helps to improve behavior.

Joe Edley (JE): Code of conduct will work best if it's uniformly enforced in small local tournaments as well as at the big venues.

MR: I always post the code of conduct at tournaments and mention it in announcements.

JE: Sometimes directors don't want to alienate a player, but it can be much better for the health of the whole club to discipline a misbehaving player. Think of the big picture. I've seen clubs that were destroyed by a single player.

JC: If you see something bad that happens, speak up right away. Don't wait. Most of the time, a warning suffices, but don't let a bad pattern be established.

DS: Had a person in my club that many people found obnoxious. Turned out that the person was, in fact, suffering from Aspberger's syndrome and unaware of it. Be aware of this as a possibility in the SCRABBLE community.

MR: Make sure people understand that anybody who sees behavior violating the code of conduct should say something.

Alan Stern (AlanS): Had a player in club who's an admitted cheater. Encouraged people who mentioned it to bring it up when it happened instead of much later. Gave him a warning and made it clear that other people are watching, too, and that a future instance would end up with a suspension from the club.

Director's Test

MR: We may consider a process of recertification for directors at some point.

Computer Software

MR: John Chew's tsh is great. But having difficulty finding somebody who can create a program with a nice Windows interface. People have started, but they turn out to have lives.

MS: Working with John Chew in advance of the tournament was really helpful in learning tsh.

Tournaments

MR: Director's Manual has much more information about tournaments now, including how to file an incident report, handling cheating, code of conduct, publicity.

JC: Since NASPA took over on July 1, we've rewritten parts of the system and moved it to the NASPA site. If you bookmarked the old site, you'll get redirected to the NASPA site. We've improved things, including better integrating the payment system with the data submission system. Step by step, when submitting results:

1. If you have a LCT or invitational that is not on the calendar, let me know beforehand. That way, we can add tourney to our database.
2. Log into NASPA, click "Director Services". If the tourney is in the database, you'll be presented with an option to submit tourney results. Old, scoreless formats are still accepted for now. When submitted, consistency results are run on the resulting file.
3. If any players are not NASPA members, then you will be blocked from submitting the tournament results. Unfortunately, there is no way right now to pay for membership online. This is my top priority after NSC.
4. Continuing the NSA tradition of requiring exactly matching names.
5. Right now, results can only be submitted by the director listed for the tournament, and only one director can be assigned. Contact me if another person should be responsible for submitting the results.

MS: Once a player has signed up for NASPA, how long does it take to register in the tourney submission system?

JC: Right now, it takes a little bit, but once fixed, it will be instantaneous.

Ruth Hamilton (RH): Had a tournament on July 26, but couldn't submit results because I wasn't listed as a director. [Discussion held over for after meeting.]

JC Green (JG): Following the model of the United Chess Federation, could we consider having memberships sold through directors at a slight discount so that, at the director's discretion, the director might charge the standard price and keep the extra to cover costs?

JC: If you are using tsh, make sure to get the event code from your event and put it into the config file, which will further automate parts of the submission process. Also, a new feature will warn you if any players aren't current NASPA members.

Ross Brown (RB): Does the NSA have any policy for pseudonymous members? Also, suggestion that the term "friendly game" game should be replaced with something like informal/club/tournament so as to not imply that tourney games aren't friendly.

Andy Saunders (AndyS): There is a way to list members on cross-tables [cross-tables.com] so that they only appear to signed-in directors (they're not even listed in the tourney player listing). Contact Seth Lipkin.

JC: We have no formal policy about whether you have to use your legal name. We should probably think about this.

AndyS: Re: The procedure for getting tourneys sanctioned under NASPA. This has been confusing. Some emails have been going directly to Joe, for example. Instead, people should be sending tourney requests to naspa-tourney@yahoogroups.com. That will send the request to the tournament committee. In order to get a tournament sanctioned: For multi-day tournaments, there shouldn't be a tournament within 200 miles on the same weekend. For a one-day tournament, there shouldn't be a tournament within 200 miles on the same day. However, if both directors approve, this can be waived. Once we receive a request, our aim is to sanction the tournament within 24 hours. Nine people are on the committee, so this should be achievable. But if it hasn't happened within 24 hours, email me at andysaunders1983ca@gmail.com.

JC: All committee member addresses are on the NASPA site.

JE: If you don't know if you're 200 miles away from somebody, make sure to check distance between tourney site addresses, not between host cities. There may be a significant difference.

Chris Cree (CC): Questions I've gotten: How far in advance can you put something on the schedule? How many events can you put on the schedule?

AndyS: This is something the Tournament Committee should discuss.

MS: We have a regional director's group, and we try to work with each other on scheduling.

AndyS: Kudos to OH, MI, PA directors for doing this.

[Long general discussion of issues raised by CC's questions. A number of ideas, including changes to the 200-mile clause to factor in number of games, problems with East Coast clustering and the 200-mile rule, one-day vs. two-day tournaments, and some other ideas. Sorry, my notes are incomplete here...the discussion was rather quick.]

AS: For now, you need 8 weeks notice for tournaments, which is a carryover from the NSA days. We might want to change that. Concerning how we determine which tourneys get priority over other tournaments for 200-mile conflicts, I'll bring ideas to the Tournament Committee. Email me and remind me of ideas.

JE: Maybe we should actively encourage forming regional director's associations.

John Fultz is director of the Champaign, IL NASPA Club #590 and a Quackle contributor.
John Fultz can be emailed at jfultz@wolfram.com.