Hello, Coaches:
The WSO board has approved the WA event schedule without changes. Therefore you can start building the team roster. Remember that we have a few surveys including volunteer forms for coaches – you can find those in earlier coach emails. A couple of notes:
Registration (deadline is Jan 15th, 2025 for full payment)
For those who have already made payments, please complete the volunteer survey so we can assign official team numbers. For those who plan to send PO, the most convenient way is to email me at statedirector@washingtonscienceolympiad.com or reply to this email. Hopefully you can use the invoice on Scilympiad to initiate the check and mail to Dave (see registration guide https://scilympiad.com/wa/reg). If you mail the PO to Dave, there may be a delay for us to verify. I will also follow up with each team regarding volunteers.
Volunteering
We requested team volunteers to help make the regional run smoothly. Those who may not be ready to assume full responsibility for an event will be assigned other tasks (e.g. helping with build, timing etc) on tournament day. Regional directors will make sure the test is held at the highest quality and integrity by pairing up experienced leads with newcomers and using volunteers from multiple schools. Head coaches are responsible to make sure there is no direct conflict of interest with their adult volunteers (e.g. having relatives competing in events they volunteered for). We will cover this in more detail in the coaching workshop.
Coaching workshop
We will have our WA Coaching workshop on Oct 12th at Camas High! It is the first time we are organizing this so bear with us for any mistakes. Please check the agenda in this registration form. Links for the virtual session will be sent to all head coaches on record. Each school can invite up to four coaches and student leaders to the virtual session. They need to register individually and submit a consent form. Each student attendee needs to fill out the registration form as well with a parent release form – for both virtual and build sessions. (https://forms.gle/Cxv3W2ppehwnGEwb6)
Lastly, I want to remind you of a couple of opportunities to engage students:
- WA state invitationals, with date posted at https://scilympiad.com/wa. We added a new Bothell B Invitational on Nov 23!
- Invitationals out of state. Most have different schedules but you will find some satellite tournaments with more flexibility. For example, Highlands Virtual Invitational gives students a chance to practice early and helps Hawaii schools raise funds for their club. You can find more on (https://www.soinc.org/play/invitationals)