The "Western" in Western Scrabble Network is not meant to indicate that we exist just to serve people who live in the "west". We like to think of it more in terms of being a "frontier" organisation.

The idea of the "west" being a frontier is common to both America and the early colony of NSW. In both regions in the early 1800's the "west" was a region just beyond or at the edge of a settled area. It was an undeveloped and unexplored region. At one stage the Blue Mountains, to the west of Sydney, were considered uncrossable, as many of the early explorers chose a route that lead to huge vertical rock walls, forcing their retreat. In America, the West posed other risks to the early pioneers who ventured beyond their comfortable surroundings in the East.

In a Scrabble context, there are still many areas that remain relatively undeveloped and unexplored. Whilst we have a pretty full tournament calendar there are other areas which we believe we can address, and dare we say, conquer!

These are:

• Making tournament-style ÿÿ ÿÿrabble aÿÿilabÿÿ to people who live in remote arÿÿs - by staging Internet-based toÿÿnaments;
• Having a club which has a clear tournament focus;
• Promoting the sense of "community" amongst Scrabble players;
• Making tournament-style Scrabble more accessible to younger players;
• Promoting competition for school aged children which has integrity and makes it easy for young players, should they choose, to switch to regular tournaments;
• Trying different techniques to promote Scrabble - such as playing in public venues, promotional clothing, radio interviews;
• Providing clear guidance and instruction to those people who would like to go on to achieve a high level in competition;
• Not being afraid to try things that haven't been done before - like playing Scrabble live on radio and Clabbers tournaments;

These are our "frontier" areas - this is our "west".

Its funny how things turned out. We did actually start off with a geographical focus - being western Sydney and the Blue Mountains. What we soon found was that players from other areas wanted to join the club - so we ended up with players on the north and south sides of Sydney. We also found that being on the net broadened our reach and it wasn't long before we had a West Australian join. We discovered that "where someone lived" was not as issue in terms of involvement in the network. Our internet tournament was able to accommodate our West Australian members just as well as it was our Sydney-based members.

When we had members in three Australian states and new people joining from all regions we had considered changing the name to something that did not suggest a geographical region. However, we decided to stick with the name Western Scrabble Network. It was easier to redefine "Western".