Hello, Coaches, mentors:
First, I am looking forward to meeting coaches at the workshop next Saturday. The morning remote session will be on the following Google Meet link 8:30AM and 12:00PM. We will go over the 2025 event and coaching Q&A first, with support by a panel of experienced coaches: Scott McComb, Matthew Chase, Edie Lie, and Betty Biswell. Then Mr. McComb and Mrs. Lie will give an overview of event supervising and answer questions on team volunteer roles. At 10:30AM, we will have Mr. McComb going more in depth on the Sustainable Energy event rule. Between 11-12, we focus on two B events: Game Agent is a new trial championed by Ron Wright, a long-time Science Olympiad coach and educator. He will give us a quick walk-through on what this event is about. Mission Possible is often hard to coach and proctor. Jason Chang, a former competitor and national supervisor, will give his perspective on coaching this event. If students want to join (we want to limit to 4/school), they should register here: https://forms.gle/Cxv3W2ppehwnGEwb6
Team registration is going well as we welcome a few new schools in each region. If your payment and volunteer survey are complete, you should have been assigned a team number, which you can find on Scilympiad–>head coach dashboard–>register teams. I typically email the head coach with the same information. For POs, please email to this email and state director account the electronic copy so we can start assigning team numbers. Please forward registration info to new coaches or new schools interested in WSO.
NW Div-B signups exceed the site capacity for the Bothell tournament site. This week, Edie Lie worked on setting up a second regional site at North Shore Middle School. We expect to keep all NW Div-B teams in NW regional on March 15th. For now please still register as NW regional, we will assign team sites after Dec 1st, by which time we can assess the possibility of allowing 7th team for some schools.
- If you plan to start a new team with only a few students and you are in NW, you can consider SW regional where we support such cases with reduced fee and have open spots. – Contact me directly for more information.
- For Div C NW teams, if you have not registered, you can register for RAHS regional since the Bothell site is almost full.
We do appreciate those of you who paid early. WSO started this year with zero dollars in the bank. Your early payments help us avoid low-balance penalties at least. If you see any potential donation opportunities or organizations that could support WSO in some collaborations, please let me and other WSO board members know.
Lastly, there are three invitationals I want to advertise: Bothell hosts a Div-B on Nov 23rd. Camas HS will host a Div-B Invitational on Dec 7th, and a Div-C one on Dec 14th. All the registration links are available on the front page of https://scilympiad.com/wa along with contact for Invitationals planned in 2025.
For the next few weeks, I will use this mirror email address for the State Director announcement. WSO board is working on website migration and email server over the next two weeks. We expect to have an entirely new website – stay tuned.