Good time of day, judges!

This is the first in a series of monthly posts detailing the state of the region. This month, let’s see what we got.

Big News

I am awful at mailing exemplars and made a post on the regional Facebook telling people the status and to reach out if they have still not received anything. If you somehow missed that and are missing exemplars, hit me up!

They debuted spheres!….again. While the old sphere system of categorizing program efforts kind of didn’t take off, the way these new ones are starting up has promise. There is already more structure within each sphere than there was for the years we had the old system. This also means that I have definitive contacts to reach out to if any of you wish to engage in a portion of the program. For awhile after spheres, I had the philosophy of “if you wanna do something, do it”. This was for a few reasons. One, the actual doing is the part most commonly forgotten when someone wishes to engage in program work and Two, the program didn’t have any type of real management of aligned projects and work efforts. It was easier and more productive to just begin your thing. Now, we’re going to adopt a hopefully more productive method of engagement wherein I will be able to establish a dialog between you and a project or sphere lead overseeing the area of the program that interests you, allowing you to hit the ground running and join the fight!  Of particularly special note, we have two of those sphere leads right here in the Southeast!  Congratulations on the “promotions” to Ben “Outside Assistance” McDole, leader of Education and to Bryan “Moss Monster” Prillaman of the newly created Exemplar sphere!

 

We changed the regional requirements for L2 exam candidacy to reincorporate the tournament report.  I made a pinned post in the slack and also posted it in the regional Facebook group.  I’ve gone ahead and pinned it in the regional Facebook group as well (found here).  Rather than go into the rationale and requirements again here, go check it out in one of our social media platforms.  It’s a lot of words about how Jess Dunks talked me into it by using the classic “inarguable logic” strategy over the course of about a half hour over the phone which I then attempt to take credit for, in classic fashion. Then we set about setting up a stronger, better tournament report requirement policy!

 

Little News

This month, we had only 1 store reach out to me directly for assistance finding a judge for a PPTQ.  That is the literal lowest it has ever been since PPTQs existed.  Better yet, the one store reached out before they sanctioned the event, like God intended!  Great, great job to all of you that have put together spreadsheets, contacted stores proactively and coordinated PPTQ coverage in the metro areas of the region.  This shows the hard work is paying off, the region, as far as in-store WOTC OP is concerned, is doing fantastically well. (as an aside, last month was 4)

We had zero stores reach out this month for assistance with judges for SCG IQs.  That could be a factor of the IQ model growing a bit stale or anticipation of the upcoming changes, but I know IQs are still being run and judges and stores are getting together regarding these on their own.  Awesome job! (last month was 3)

We had 6 players reach out, 3 to offer positive feedback (2 via the judge feedback form, which is really rare, positive feedback makes up about 5% of total feedback reports I get from that tool) and 3 to become judges.  We had zero negative feedback and zero getting anyone reported to WotC (congratulations to the South Florida judge community for going a whole month clean!).  All in all, activity was a bit low, I was gone for a week in the Netherlands and we are entering the holiday season.  Keep up the great work, have a happy holiday season and holler at your boy if ya hear meeeeeee!