Great Lakes 2016 State of the Region

I want to thank each and every judge in the region for what we accomplished in our first year as a region. We’ve made a lot of great progress. The region grew by 6% overall and the number of L2s increased by 22%. We moved to make conferences more accessible to judges throughout the region, and I think that was a roaring success.

This was a good year, but there wasn’t any competition from last year. Everything we did this year was the first time. There was nothing to compare to. We were breaking new ground, and that’s exciting and easy. Now comes expectations. We have to balance the expectations of what was established this year, with always striving to improve and move forward. Conferences changes worked well…how do we improve it? We grew in numbers…how do we make sure we are growing in quality? What’s next?

We did some good things this year no doubt, but we also have opportunities for improvement in other areas. We can continue to move forward on building better relationships with TOs in the region. We can grow in need areas of the region. We can invest more time in improving the quality of our judges.

I thought a lot about these questions and opportunities as I planned for the upcoming year. While I was planning, I saw a quote from Walt Disney and it conveyed a mindset I want our region to embody.

We want to always be moving forward. We look back at the past to see where we’ve been so we can know where we need to go. I want to always be plotting our way forward. Whether we have done things well or done them poorly, it is forward motion that matters. We want to always be moving forward and improving so that as an obstacle presents itself we think our way around it. It’s a good state of mind not only for judging, but also for life. So here’s how I propose we move forward in 2017 based on our learning from 2016.

Regional Leadership

We opened the year with an Area Captain system, and I commend the Area Captains. They did a great job as we transitioned into our new region in providing both me and local judges with support as I stepped into the role as your RC. During this year, I learned about our region and the Area Captain role as a whole. The role was overloaded in our region as the level of involvement looked to be similarly to an L3 judge which isn’t sustainable or fair to the people in the role. Also I found that we have judges that want to be involved in projects but using Area Captains we limit the involvement of other judges. So starting in 2017 we will be doing away with the Area Captain Role in our region and switching to regional projects for our initiatives and all L2 judges in the region are invited to be a part of our leadership group. The projects are called out in topics below and there will be a google form for judges to sign up.

Communication

With the removing of the Area Captain role, there is a definite concern about how information will be disseminated throughout the region. To increase communication I will be doing a monthly state of the region blog post updating on regional projects as well as keeping us focused on our regional goals this year. Also there will be monthly L3 meeting and a quarterly leadership online meetings for all L2 judges in the region. In addition to the meetings there will be new slack channels and a new facebook group for L2+ judges in the region. This will enable the regional leaders to discuss topics frequently while keeping everyone informed and on track to meet our goals.

The Communication Project group that currently manages the communication in our FB group and Slack will continue to do so. They have done a great job thus far and I expect they will continue to do so as they add in managing the new facebook group and channel.

#GetOutandJudge

One thing I learned more than anything last year is just how many events hit our region. With the amount of SCG Opens and GPs that come through our region when combined with the sheer amount of stores running PPTQs we can lose sight of just how active a judge community we are. I want to increase the visibility of our judges in the region this year. Great Lakes Judges judge a lot of events from FNM to PPTQs to GPs and I want to recognize the effort our community produces. I propose that on all social media posts regarding judges or going to events we mark it with #GetOutandJudge on our posts. By using this on all events we validate the equality of all our effort. We call attention to our local TOs letting them know the active judges. We call attention to local players so they can know who to approach if they have a question about the rules or maybe they are interested in becoming a judge. This is a project we can all take part in and it becomes a mark of solidarity for all of us…so I hope to see you #GetOutandJudge a lot of events in 2017 I know I will.

TO Relations

This effort surrounds PPTQ scheduling but also helping them understand the best ways to solicit judges and best practices when soliciting judges. We currently are doing a good job with PPTQ tracking at a local or even state level and those of you running these spreadsheets are doing an excellent job. The next step is to identify new PPTQ TOs and help them understand best practices around judge solicitation and event scheduling. This will help the local TOs know what resources are available to them as well as provide value to the judges and players by ensuring there aren’t too many TOs trying to run events on any given day.

This TO Relations project will focus on continuing the good work being done locally to track pptq events and putting them in a unified place for the region. Creating a document for new TOs to help them understand scheduling best practices. Work to identify them and share the document to help everyone schedule events in such a way to help everyone involved.

Next Step

This year saw the launch of the next step program ensuring that all new L1s in our region were brought in with the all the knowledge and tools needed to be a successful member of our community. This was a great project that helped us ensure that all new L1s start with a good knowledge of our region and who their resources in our region are.

Now I want this to go further, the Next Step project will work to create resources for new L2 judges. The goal will be a guide to best practices and documentation for certifying new judges, resources for new head judges to be aware of, and what community support there is for them. This project will work in concert with the L2 Testers and L3s to ensure this documentation is thorough and kept up to date.

Mentorship

I was very pleased to see the work that was done this year in helping 11 new L2s level up. We also had our first class of L2 Testers and I’m proud to have this group working to help develop candidates for L2.

This Mentorship project will be the L2 Testers and L3s helping candidates find solid mentors to help them with their candidacy for L1 and L2. In addition I want to see this project a series of blog posts to help identify the requirements for L2 and able to help candidates have a clear portrait of what’s required. Finally with tests coming for all judge levels in 2017, this project will work with judges who haven’t passed those exams to improve their knowledge.

Conferences

This year we did a great job at making conferences accessible to more people in more locations in the region. This helped ensure more of us had the opportunity to have the networking, learning, and community opportunity that a conference brings. I want to continue this approach in this year, but use some of what we learned about conference size and presentation composition.

This Conference project will balance creating a large regional conference with creating a slate of smaller conferences to enable a high level of both quality and availability for conferences throughout the region.

If you are interested in joining any of these projects please sign up at the google form here so that we can get the interested judges together to get to work. If you are interested in creating a project you don’t see here, I’d love to hear about it. (Google Form https://goo.gl/forms/qXdffpWLknOIGluD2)

I’m extremely proud of the region we have and every member that we currently have but we have room to improve collectively and as individuals. If we continually improve then we will always be better than we were the day before. It will make us a better region. It will make us better judges. It will make us better people.

So Great Lakes Region the question is What’s Next?

Keep Moving forward!