A club by any other name...

Followers of this blog - and visitors to our website - may have noticed a few changes starting yesterday. In addition to now being NASPA Club #620, we are now the Kanawha Valley Scrabble Club, a name chosen and voted upon by our club members.

(Edit: To clarify, the correct way to pronounce Kanawha is ken-AW-ah. More frequently around here, the last syllable is dropped - so ken-AW is also acceptable.)

Several candidate names were submitted, and these names were then ranked by our club members in a Schulze method election. Kanawha Valley Scrabble Club emerged as the winner, defeating every other name except one, which it tied.

When I proposed this contest, I stated that the winning submission would get NASPA membership courtesy of me (as opposed to the club's treasury) through 2010. As it turned out, Martha submitted the victorious name. Naturally, I disqualified her from winning the prize to avoid any impropriety, but I gave her the option of deciding what should be done. She suggested that I should have a random drawing in which everyone who submitted a name got a shot at winning the NASPA membership. This, to me, sounded like a fair way to resolve this outstanding issue.

So last night, at our first official meeting as a NASPA club, I assigned each submitter's name (except Martha's) to a Scrabble tile, put those tiles in a convenient container (the purse of one of our members), and drew one out. And the winner of the NASPA membership is... Tina Totten King.

Thanks again to everyone who sent in a name, voted, or otherwise helped with this fun contest. I'm looking forward to our new role in the world of NASPA, and for those of you who haven't joined yet, please do!