Organizers Peter Schwartzman and Darla Krejci are excited to announce that Galesburg will host three days of competitive Scrabble April 11-13. The "Spring Fling" will consist of two one-day Scrabble tournaments on Saturday, April 11 and Sunday, April 12, followed by a celebration of National Scrabble Day on Monday April 13.

“When we found out National Scrabble Day fell on the Monday after our spring tournaments, we decided to extend our tournaments and really celebrate Scrabble in Galesburg,” states Schwartzman. “Josh Greenway will stream our tournaments and related events live on his YouTube Channel "Let’s Play Scrabble" and we’ll celebrate National Scrabble Day with a four-game tournament and a simo-play where four or five players will compete simultaneously against 2023 National Scrabble Champion Josh Sokol. We may have other surprises too on Monday. We are very excited to be the only US city we know of that is going to celebrate National Scrabble Day with style, at the local Galesburg Best Western!"

“With Josh Sokol in attendance and the live stream, this is going to be a fantastic event,” add Krejci. “We are thrilled to be once again partnering with the Galesburg Community Arts Center by hosting the event in their facility, and to expand interest in Scrabble we’ve started a local Scrabble Club. The club meets every Tuesday at 6:00 at the Galesburg Public Library and all levels of players are welcome. We also have a Facebook page called Galesburg Scrabble and a new webpage, scrabblegalesburg.org, which has lots of cool resources.”

All three tournaments are sanctioned by WGPO (Word Games Players' Organization.) The Spring Fling I and Spring Fling II will each consist of seven head-to-head games. There will be two dictionary sections: (1) WOW, which is considered the current American Scrabble Dictionary for tournaments; and, (2) CSW, which consist of words in the Collins (Global) dictionary. The WOW section will likely have at least three divisions based on the rating of the players. People do not need to have an official rating to play, but they do need to join WGPO whose membership is free.

For more information contact Peter Schwartzman at drearth1@gmail.com or Darla Krejci at krejcidarla@gmail.com or check out the Facebook page Scrabble Galesburg. To sign up to participate in a Spring Fling tournaments or join the National Scrabble Day Celebration access the tournament flyers at www.cross-tables.com or wordgameplayers.org/tournaments/ .

Darla Krejci

309-299-7888

Peter Schwartzman

309-877-1988