Carolina Speedcubing

I realize this thread's been dead for a while, but I'll say a little something in an attempt to revive the cubing community in the Carolinas.

I'll start with a little blurb about myself (presumably most cubers today don't know who I am). The KOII (Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois) cubers are familiar with me because I've been an organizer/staff member in 27 of the 28 competitions I've been to (bonus points for guessing the one I didn't help out at!) I lived in Ohio for 4 years but moved to Durham, North Carolina in August 2013. I'll be here until at least 2018. I'm pretty busy with grad school so I probably won't be able to organize competitions myself until, say, mid-2015. But I am more than happy to delegate competitions if you're willing to put in the effort to organize one.

In the last 6 months or so, I've received 3 different requests for me to delegate competitions (2 in NC, 1 in SC). Only one of them has come to fruition (South Carolina Open 2014). SirWaffle/Sydney deserves a lot of credit for working hard to make this happen. About a month ago, she knew very little about scheduling events efficiently or setting up tables and chairs at a competition venue so that traffic flows smoothly, but she drafted her ideas and I provided feedback until we were both satisfied with the plan. This is only a glimpse of the stuff that you have to think about. There have been 35 emails going back and forth between us since late January, but it wasn't until yesterday that things got finalized and announced on the WCA website (actually, this could've been done quite a bit sooner if I hadn't been so busy with school). Now that it's official, there's still a lot more preparation to be done before we're ready to run the competition in May. She's (I assume) still in high school, just like most of you, so there's absolutely no reason you can't make a competition happen if you really want to. I really hope this inspires some of you to try to organize competitions on your own, which, looking at this thread, I think a lot of you do want to have official competitions in the area.

Now that I've talked a bit about what you need to do to make it work, let's talk about what not to do. Let me emphasize that this is not an attempt to discount the sincerity or efforts of those who proposed the 2 other competitions that didn't happen; sometimes things just don't go as expected and it's not because of a lack of effort.
  • Don't disappear. If you stop replying to my emails after a while, i.e., if I have to prompt you multiple times for you to get back to me about a question I asked, you're telling me that you don't care enough about making the competition happen. If you don't (yet) know the answer, tell me that you don't and we'll figure something out together. I need to know that you're serious about planning the competition so that I can be confident about you running the competition.
  • Don't expect me to make decisions for you. It's your competition, take ownership and be proud of it. If you're inexperienced, I'll gladly give pointers all day long. But ultimately, you have to book the venue, you have to come up with the schedule, you have to figure out the parking situation, etc. I will help you with all these things but when the competition is over, I want you to be able to look back and say you put in the work and you made it happen, so that you get the confidence to do it again because it's a wonderful thing you're doing for the community. You're letting the younger kids compete and inspiring the older kids to organize their own competitions.
  • Please, please, please have a venue in mind that you're 90% sure you can book. Without a venue, we can't do anything concrete. If it's close enough for me to drive out and scout the venue, I will. Otherwise, I will want floorplans/pictures from you to make sure we don't end up with something unusable. Public libraries are common venues, so are school cafeterias.

Skimming through this thread, it looks like a lot of cubers are close the Charlotte area. I'm willing to go down there (or anywhere that I think is reasonable, just ask) on a Saturday or Sunday (if I'm free) to meet up with you and talk through details that are hard to communicate through email. If your parents are just as enthusiastic as you are, get them involved, they are (probably) more mature than you are.

I realize that there haven't been many competitions in this region, so a lot of you will be inexperienced. I am willing to consider first-time organizers who have never been to a WCA competition before, but you have a lot of convincing to do. Convince me that you're serious, that you're capable, that you're not just doing it to compete in events you like so you can set personal bests. The more responsible/prompt you are during our email correspondence, the more confident I am in you. If you're getting back to me quicker than I'm getting back to you, that's fantastic (which really isn't hard, given how busy I am these days). You can find my email address on the WCA delegates page (if you want it bad enough you'll find it).
 
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Hmm...I live in Clemson, SC so I guess I might be able to make it to a meet up, as long as the drive isn't over 2 hours. Greenville works great for me, though!
 
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