A brief history of WV Scrabble

The club was founded May 24, 2005 as NSA Club 620 — Brad Mills was the founding director (and is still the club director). The first club meeting was Tuesday, June 14, 2005 at Books-A-Million, with Brad Mills, Martha Mills, and Arnold Keaton attending. In 2006, meetings were moved to Saturdays; in 2007, Tuesday meetings were re-added to the schedule, and in 2008, these were moved to Wednesdays.

We have always met at Books-A-Million. Our extra meetings used to be at Capitol Roasters, they were moved to Los Agaves in late 2008.

On April 1, 2009, our club transitioned to the North American Scrabble Players Association when Hasbro (owners of the Scrabble® mark) dropped financial support for club and tournament Scrabble activity. At the same time, we adopted the name Kanawha Valley Scrabble Club to better define who we are.

Lisa Green and Chris Ross both became directors in 2010.

Tournaments

Our first club tournament was in December 2005.

Our first fully-rated tournament was July 7-9, 2006. 36 people attended. We have had at least one fully-rated tournament every year since. Our largest tournament, in 2008, had 61 participants.

The 7th Annual WV Scrabble Tournament will be held in 2012.

Other stuff

Throughout 2008 we lent support to the nascent Huntington Scrabble Club, which had its first meeting on May 3, 2008. In October, 2008, Aaron McGuffin became the second sanctioned director in West Virginia, and he formed Club #767 in Huntington.

We have provided, at various times when requested, logistic and technical support to the Pittsburgh, PA club and the Lexington, KY club. We attempt to coordinate our events with other clubs in the region to make sure everyone has an opportunity to play as much Scrabble as possible.