11/8/19 Hello, fellow coaches. You are receiving this email because your school is signed up for the Jeffrey Trail Invitational Tournament on February 1st, 2020. Here are the latest updates regarding the Invitational: 1) Tournament Website: The tournament website has been updated. See the Jeffrey Trail Invitational link for the latest information. 2) Registration: We currently have 69 teams registered!!!! We originally wanted to keep it at 62 but with the help of a number of partners we think we can push that number to just under 70. This will be very big “B” level tournament. Registration fees have started to arrive and I will post a spreadsheet in the next week or two that shows payments that we have received. We are waiting just a couple more days for a couple out of state teams to decide on whether they can come out. We will leave registration open for now. 3) Proctor Assignments and Team Numbers: The teams, team numbers, and events assignments are up on the invitational website. See above for link. Each school will be responsible to proctor at least one event. This year, to improve the efficiency of the tournament and reduce the hassle for attending teams, many tests will be written by a hand-selected qualified pool of past competitors and coaches from across the country. Teams assigned those events will be responsible for proctoring, grading and ranking each of the teams in that event. Please look over the event we have you scheduled to run and let us know ASAP if you cannot do a good job with that event. We will send out more instructions about events at a later date. We did honor most school's top three event requests, although five events will be run from the fourth through sixth choices. We have two schools running Experimental Design, Anatomy, Boomilever, Mission Possible, and Mouse Trap Vehicle since they will be tough to run with the high number of teams; we will be sending out contact information to those schools soon so you can coordinate to run those events. If you are in charge of an event and think that you’ll need an additional school to help, please send me an email. My biggest fear with so many teams is that one or two events won’t be able to finish grading on time. We have assigned a couple teams to run trial events. For new coaches, trial events are potential future events. The scores from these events will not count towards team scores. Individual medals will be given for 1-4th place but these ranks will not count towards overall team scores. This year we will follow the Southern California State lead and run two trial events. These events include Electric Wright Stuff and Solar Power. In addition to the two trial events, we will run "Game On" as "medal only." If not a trial event, we would ask that your 2nd team(s) help run the invitational by providing volunteers to help run some of the more difficult to grade events (events that take longer to grade) so the event supervisor can be grading while the second and third hours of that event are going on. We are also looking into a way to ask for parent volunteers (we are working on the logistics of this but providing parent volunteers will be optional for schools, not mandatory); we are hoping this assistance will allow us to start the awards ceremony on time and get everyone out earlier. 4) Regional Registration: It is a National Science Olympiad rule that all teams competing in any invitational be registered with their local region. Teams and invitationals that violate this rule are subject to severe consequences including not being able to compete at any level, so we will be enforcing this rule. We will be checking with your regional/state director starting December 1st. Please try to ensure your team(s) is/are registered by then. Teams that we cannot confirm registrations for will not be able to compete. 5) Engineering sign ups: Sign ups will be done on-line, and the date is still being determined, but we are looking at the middle of January. We will send out the date, time, and method when we have determined all the details. All “medal only” events will be self-scheduled using this system. 6) Schedule: Invitational schedule will follow the Southern California state schedule which can be found at this link:Tournament Schedule 7) Schedule conflicts: Since we have a number of first time teams and coaches, event conflicts are part of Science Olympiad and will occur at basically every tournament that you compete in. There is nothing we can do about that. In our experience, these conflicts allow students to try new events and have often resulted in very positive outcomes as students learn they enjoy a different subject (granted, other times it results in students confirming they don't like the new subject, but at least it is now an informed distaste). We encourage all coaches to work with their teams to determine the best way for you to handle the conflicts. 8) Glider Clinic: This year we are excited to be working with Josh and Hope Finn from J&H Aerospace! For those of you unfamiliar with Josh, he is a world class AMA builder and competitor. You can see his planes on https://jhaerospace.com/ and his YouTube channel. Josh will be coming out from Georgia and giving two clinics on the Friday(Jan 31) prior to the tournament. The first clinic Friday morning will be for building an ELG glider and the second clinic will be in the afternoon and focus on flying techniques. Lots more information to come on the clinics. 9. Elementary Glider Event: In effort to get younger (elementary students) involved in our tournament https://aerovate.org will host an event for elementary school students. These students will not necessarily have to be associated with a middle school team. This is perfect for students who have younger brothers and sisters who might be in elementary school. Medals will be awarded to these younger student who participate. We encourage as many elementary school students as possible who are interested to sign up. More information to come. Free sign ups and more information can be found on aerovate.org. 10) Hotels: For teams that are interested in securing hotel rooms for the Invitational, please contact me for a list of recommended hotels. 11) Homerooms: Unfortunately, teams will not be provided homerooms. Please plan on camping out somewhere on campus. In case of rain, there are many covered walkways available. When you set up your “campsite” please keep a portion of the walkway clear for people to get by. As we try to do with all updates, a copy of this update can be found on the website. Looking forward to having your team at the Jeffrey Trail Invitational Tournament. Please email me if you have any questions or concerns! Shaun Evola Email: [email protected]