Why Isn’t There a Competition In Your Home Town?

A Guide to Creating a Community

We often get emails from cubing enthusiasts asking us to hold a competition in their home town. Sometimes it is a small remote town, but sometimes it is a larger city, like Winnipeg or Regina.

The truth is that we would love to come to your town and put on a competition.  That is our goal, to bring competitions to as many places in Canada as possible.  However, holding official competitions is quite a process.

We are based out of Toronto, which means in order for us to hold a competition out in a remote city, a great deal of time and money are required.  We need to ship equipment to the location and send a delegate there which requires flight and accommodations for multiple nights.

Then there is the question of where to hold the event.  Finding a suitable venue is difficult and can often come with a cost of its own. Additionally, we need to supply prizes, pay for printing costs of score cards, certificates, name tags, etc.

We pay for these costs via the registration fees that competitors pay in order to compete.  Under our standard pricing model that we prefer to use, competitors pay, on average, about $18 a piece.  Therefore, some quick calculations will tell you we need a lot of competitors to justify the costs associated with holding a competition in a new city.

Truth be told, we don’t have a lot of cubers outside of the communities we are currently servicing.  Toronto is the hot bed of cubing in Canada.  Both Ottawa/Montreal and Vancouver communities come second, and Atlantic Canada coming in third.  Other than that, many of the cubers in other cities only know about two or three other cubers.

What Can You Do?

So what can you do? Start by reaching out to every cuber in your area and arrange informal get-togethers. Learn the process of scrambling and judging according to the WCA regulations. You will need people to do these things for an official competition. It is the responsibility of the community itself to fill these roles.

Next, teach others to solve, be it family, friends, or just go to a community centre or library and start cubing. A good rule of thumb is to get about 30 competitors to show you have a viable cubing community in your area.

Use social media to your advantage here. Create a facebook group, post in your local classified section, post flyer in local schools or community centres. Anything to help get the word out that speedcubing is a thing and a way for people to get started.

Once you start to get a decent number of cubers in your area, hold unofficial competitions.  You will follow the regulations as though it were an official competition, even recording the results.

Once you can show you have a viable community, we can begin to work towards having an official competition there.  We will even cover the costs of the first competition at that point.  But the time and cost commitments are too high for us to travel to a new community to host a competition unless you can show there are enough cubers there.

The “hold it and they will come” approach isn’t enough.

If you are interested in getting started, post here or send us a message and we would be happy to help guide you through the process and assist where we can.