Welcome back! Last time I spent some time talking and reflecting on our direction in 2017, and this week I’d like to share our plans for 2018! My aim is to keep this post forward-looking and positive, so I’m going to address the elephant in the room (background checks) in a separate post. Various conversations and some research is still being ironed out, so I’ll ask you to be patient while we gather in the last threads and try to provide the best possible advice all in one place.

Let’s talk about our priorities for this year!

Priority – Conferences and Regional Events:

Conferences will be another flagship project for Canada this year. I’ve been working closely with David Poon who will be our conferences “Head Judge” for this year. Our best efforts will be at providing strong geographic ‘saturation’ over the year. We are going to be recruiting Canadian judges to fill a number of functions within conferences – scheduling, coordinating post-conference presenter feedback, and this year we are going to build out a team to work with presenters before the conference to provide feedback and help flesh out and improve presentations. If you would like to help out with this project you can apply here!

Priority – Local Meetups, Regional Events, and Swag:

Hype Team! I get feedback often from judges looking for a judge shirt for their local events and cool swag to represent our awesome/frozen judge family. This team will be responsible for designing and distributing judge swag! They will also be coordinating ‘judge meetups’ like our holiday parties last year. I’d love to see those happen more often so we are going to work to organize them … well … more often! This group of sassy individuals will also maintain the judge blog to tell our story, and keep up the exemplar posts. Regardless of what your opinion is on the relationship between exemplar and high-value foils, I strongly believe that the instructional and morale benefit of exemplar is worth sharing … and it feels great to read about all the wonderful things Canadians are doing! Mike Gyssels did a great job keeping that alive last year, so I’m happy to announce he’s our “Hype Team Head Judge” for 2018. If any of the above sound like initiatives you want to contribute to – you can apply here by February 3rd.

Priority – Online Training and Advancement Preparation

2018 is a good year for us to focus on improving our ‘hard skill’: rules, policy, investigations, and tournament logistics. Channel Fireball Events is headed north to run FOUR GPs this year and I want us to be ready. One way we can accomplish this and overcome the distance between us is a dedicated team to create educational material and leveraging the tools available on the internet to bridge the gap between Canadian judges.

This project is still a work-in-progress, and I’m actually looking for someone to lead it. I’m not going to lie – I expect this to be a relatively time-intensive commitment, but if you are up for it you can fire me a message via email or on facebook. There are plenty of education resources scattered around online, so we won’t need to reinvent the wheel by creating new articles on how replacement effects work or some change in policy. Instead I would like our focus to be on creating mentorship groups, and directing judges to resources they need. From a big-picture perspective I’d like for me to be able to bring a judge to this team and say “Hey, here is a L0 looking to level up. Can you help them?”, or “Hey, here are 2-3 L1s who feel ready to test for L2 at their next GP. Can you coordinate a study group, or assess their areas to work on and point them at some resources?” and have the team take it from there.

I haven’t ironed out more details than this, so if you feel like taking it on make sure you come to the table with some ideas

My personal focus is to do what I can to stay connect with each of you. I’m going to be at Canadian GPs, RPTQs, Nationals (if that’s a thing in 2018) and doing my best to continue to be available to you via email, facebook, and as many appearances in online meetups as I can.

I have to say I’m really looking forward to 2018 – and I couldn’t have picked a more polite group of toque-wearing judges to live it with!