Coaches, Club Presidents:
Happy New Year! We just concluded our Winter board meeting. We are also near completion of 2024-25 registration period. There are a few important updates that I would like to share with you. Please read this email in its entirety.
- Regional and state tournament preparations are on schedule. We have (unified) schedule, tournament site and dates on https://scilympiad.com/wa. You can find your team number once you login as coach if your team registration is complete. Once registration closes on Jan 15th, regional assignments should be final. The current assignments for each team are viewable on https://scilympiad.com/wa/reg/school (if viewed in desktop mode).
- If your team has not registered, please do so before Jan 9th, and have payment completed before Jan 15th.
- Beside the regular 23 events, we will run one trial event in each division in the NW regional: Cybersecurity (C) and Fermi Questions (B). For SW regional and Eastern Regional there may also be trials to be determined. More details will be communicated by regional directors. For state, we will have three trials for Division B (Game Agent, Fermi Questions, Botany), and two trials for Division C (Cybersecurity and Botany).
- For Sustainable Energy (B/C), we updated the rubric and FAQs for regional and state – see below. We encourage upcoming Invitational to adopt the latest rule which provides more consistent build scoring and a more streamlined testing process.
- Updated rule (changes are highlighted in bold)
- Rev3 scoresheet (implementing rule updates, to be used for regional/state scoring)
- FAQ and Supervisor’s Guide (clearer guidance on impound, intent of testing target and sequence etc.)
- At the winter meeting, our WSO board adopted as part of the WSO policy some of the changes that we championed this year and other proposals. The main changes (highlighted in red) are
- Requiring team to provide volunteers to support regional (exact implementation can vary by regional director)
- Allow WA specific schedule to be released after National rule and trial event release
- Clarification on state qualification if teams participate in non-local regionals
- These changes will be reviewed again at the Annual meeting by all coaches with voting memberships before finalizing as the new policy.
I like to give coaches a heads up as our Annual meeting may be moved to early June to allow more coach participation before school is in recess. If you have any feedback on these changes, questions about registration deadline, inquiry on regional and state, do let me know.
We will send out solicitations for new board members and student advisors once the Annual meeting date is finalized. If a public state director search is needed, we will also share that as soon as possible. However, you don’t need to wait if you are interested in the board positions. You can nominate someone or yourself now by emailing “statedirector@washingtonscienceolympiad.com” with your application letter and brief CV. More information can be found at at https://washingtonscienceolympiad.com/directors.html#interest
Thank you for your dedication!
Best
Lei Jiang