[Mark McLeod]

Greetings Teams:

This year due to some wonderful recruiting efforts by our Washington state local committee and the availability of Washington state grants we have a very large number of new teams in the State of Washington.

This is the good news. The not so good news is this gives us a significant problem in that these grants mandate these teams participate in their home state regional. So, in order to satisfy both the grant conditions as well as the needs and wishes of our out of state teams, we have devised a phased registration approach as follows.

During initial event registration the Seattle Regional will be open only to teams from Washington state, thus allowing the new grant teams to get registered and meet the grant requirements. Then, on October 23rd when second registration opens, all other teams will have the opportunity to register for remaining spots. We know that this will be a disappointment to many out of state teams, especially those in Oregon, Idaho or British Columbia, who might want to register for Seattle as their first event and then perhaps go to Portland, or elsewhere, for a second event. However, please know we are actively working with the Key Arena in Seattle to find ways to increase the number of teams that we can accommodate at the competition and, if that works out, which we believe it will, more places should open up for out of state teams.

We thank you in advance for you support and understanding as we work through the challenges some of our new, and unexpected opportunities bring.

Go Teams!