Editor’s Note: This article ends our series of highlighted exemplar recognitions. See our introduction post for all the details, or view all the posts in this series. This article was written by Level 3 Judge Joe Hughto.

Judges! Welcome to day fifteen of our fourteen-day run of highlighting Exemplary judges in the region. It’s also Christmas, so happy that if that’s your thing.

When the idea to do this came up, the area reps got together to pick their top five judges they’d like to highlight as part of this initiative. The outcome from that was that we had too many judges to highlight, so that list needed to be pared down. However, some very nice things were said about some people in our region that didn’t quite make it to our series of highlighted judges.

It’s my honor and pleasure to do some quick further highlights of just some of the awesome people in our region.

We had seventeen ‘unused’ highlights that were submitted and here’s a selection of seven of them.

Chris Cahill had the following to say about Asa Russell:

Asa is one of the many L1’s we have in our area, Amherst specifically, that really lay claim to that scope: making events not only awesome, but actually happen for their local store.

Gil Medeiros had the following to say about Ian Taylor:

Ian Taylor has been a part of the judge program for 17 years, whenever he is around he shares stories to the judges about different times in magics past (and makes me feel like a small child again for that matter).  His unending devotion to the Magic Judge program through all of its changes over the years is exemplary and frankly amazing.

Sam Nathanson had the following to say about KB Bishop:

They are a new face who works hard and keeps their head down. However, KB is always present with a smile and very willing to work. KB shows us all that sometimes greatness doesn’t have to be loud or obvious.

Elliot Raff had the following to say about fellow Area Rep Bryan Hare:

Bryan’s mentorship skills are frankly beyond compare. In his work with many local game stores in the area, Bryan has done more to grow and cultivate the Greater Boston judge community than anyone. He brings a passion that is infectious, customer service skills that are unparalleled, and a desire to better the people around him 24/7. He is also the shoo-in to lead the Hype Team at any given event, which is a team that he firmly believes should be a real thing.

Ilan Seid-Green had the following to say about Brett Schmuckler:

Brett really represents the aspect of self-improvement that the Judge program is all about. He takes feedback very well and works hard to improve to represent the program well and provide for his community. He has a lot of skill, and is willing to step up and apply it when he’s needed, as mentioned in his recommendation.

Joe Steet did a pair of highlights about Adam Stadelman and Nathan Gellin:

I may be a little biased because I wrote these, but Nathan and Adam showed tremendous teamwork outside of an event. They both came to my store’s owners with a detailed plan for running a tournament series (which in an of itself shows commendable drive and courage) and were an absolutely perfect team. They took turns speaking, didn’t interrupt or talk over each other, and later when I separated them and leaned on them to brag about themselves, each of them would only give more credit to the other. They worked together so closely I actually couldn’t come up with a difference (beyond their names) for the exemplar recognitions I wanted to write them, so I got permission from Kim Warren to basically submit the same rec twice. I really can’t describe how much I liked this, it really made a very lasting impression in that I still regularly think about it more than six months later.

Chris Wendelboe had the following to say about Benjamin Coursey:

Yoni’s recognition for Ben highlights something we don’t often see: judges being recognized for work in a support role.  Ben has done an amazing job assisting with PPTQs and SCG States for quite some time now, and his players are always super happy with his events.  We like happy players. 🙂

As you can tell from this post and from the last fourteen days of posts, we have lots of great people in the region who spend a lot of time in a variety of ways helping push the program forward and the people in it forward.

Overall, our region had 150 Exemplar recognitions and those went to 79 unique people. To give a sense of scale, we currently have about 450 judges in the region. It’s really hard to figure out how many of these people are active, but just from these numbers, this means that somewhere near 20% of the judges in our region were evaluated as Exemplary by others. There are lots of reasons why I’m so proud to be a part of this region, and this is just one example.

This now ends our series of posts from this wave highlighting Exemplary judges in the region. I hope that you all had a great time reading about all of the good things that people in the region are doing. Remember that the next wave of the Exemplar Program closes on February 1st at 3am, and this time there are a lot more slots available for judges level 2 and above. If you see something Exemplary that others are doing, make sure you do your best to recognize them.