We hope everyone has had a great holiday season and that your teams are progressing well!

Your regional board is gearing up for our first in-person tournament in several years, and looking forward to seeing everyone there. To plan appropriately for the tournament and get all the teams, judges, and volunteers scheduled, we need everyone to wrap up their tournament registrations as soon as possible – by Jan 14th at the latest.

As a reminder, to complete your registrations, first, get your team’s designated judge and volunteer to register. Have them:

  1. Go to https://nwvoices.org, select LOGIN from the top menu, and then select the region of the team (14-Catoctin, or 16-Dulles)
  2. Click “Register as a Judge” or “Register as a Volunteer” as appropriate.
  3. Fill in the required information and submit
  4. Be sure they select the school and coach that they are supporting.

Once the judge and volunteer are registered, the coach should register the team:

  1. Go to https://nwvoices.org, select LOGIN from the top menu, and login using the account information you created
  2. Select the option to register a Primary team or a Div I-III team as appropriate.
  3. Fill out the required information, including ensuring your judge and volunteer are listed correctly.
  4. Enter your payment information and submit

At that point, you are all set.

Here are some tips to remember:

  • Be sure to provide information on any unavoidable time conflicts for team members, e.g., “Team member X is not available after 3 PM due to a mandatory school band event”. If you do not provide this information upfront, it will be tough to accommodate later. We will do our best to work around conflicts due to mandatory school events.
  • We will send out any schedule information for teams, judges, or volunteers about two weeks before the tournament. Coaches will be able to ensure that we did not miss or misunderstand any conflict information before we publish the final schedule.
  • Judges should make their meal selections carefully – meals will be prepared and tagged for each judge, and no alternatives will be available on tournament day.
  • Judges must be available to attend in-person training on Feb 11 (or Feb 18 in case of snow). If a judge cannot attend that training, they can attend training from another Virginia region. Please let us know if a judge plans to attend an alternate training session. Those dates and locations will be posted here as they are announced: https://www.odysseyofthemind.com/state-events/?assoc=VA
  • Judges can expect to be needed from 7:30 AM to roughly 4 PM on tournament day. If they are parents, they will NOT be able to see their child perform.
  • Volunteers do not have to attend training and will be scheduled for a two-hour shift on tournament day. Their shifts will be scheduled so that they CAN see their child perform.

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to contact us at: rd@nwvoices.org

Sheryl Lemma and Tom Coate

Regions 14 & 16 co-Directors