National Collegiate Pokemon Association

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Posted with tentative permission from OmegaDonut, who may delete this if he feels it is advertising against the spirit of Smogon's rules.

Hey, guys. I know there are a lot of college students on this board, some of which may have leagues they compete in.

Anyways, I'm not sure how many of you are familiar, but recently TTS, dtrain, and BlueCookies all went to Japan and got a glimpse at their unofficial tournmanent scene. Let's just say they're leaps and bounds ahead of us. By meeting up face to face regularly, they have a richer Pokemon experience. I'm not going to say they're better or worse players than we are, but they seem to have a lot of fun.

Well, the U.S. is way too big for regular face to face meetings. However, we should be promoting face to face contact on some level. This means we should be promoting leagues, so at least there's personal contact on a local scale. We focused on college leagues, since they tend to be more developed that those actually supported by TPCi. Furthermore, we should put these leagues under one "banner" so to speak, just to give them a venue where leagues can face off against each other. With this in mind, Duy and I came up with the National Collegiate Pokemon Association. (NCPA)

What are the NCPA's aims?
1. To foster the environment for VGC leagues on colleges across North America.

2. To create a gateway for leagues to contact each other for competition, either in person or online.

3. In doing the above two goals, not stepping in the day to day affairs of the leagues or any Pokemon competitive battling communities

In order to respect the rules against advertising on many communities, we are limiting ourselves to a Facebook group found at www.facebook.com/groups/402684876435975/


Our current plans are to incorporate the following schools by the end of the year:
University of Victoria
University of California Santa Cruz
UC Davis
University of Pittsburgh
Florida State Pokemon League
Ohio State Pokemon League
Penn State
University of Loyola-Chicago
University of Utah
Oklahoma State
University of North Texas

These schools have Pokemon scenes of various sizes, and we’d also appreciate your advice in how to increase the sizes of the playerbases in schools that need it.

If your school has a Pokemon VGC league of any size, or would be willing to start one, feel free to join the group.

Lastly, while we are focusing on college students due to their resources and density of Pokemon players, we will not refuse leagues comprised of younger or older members.

I will be in Indianapolis for Nationals, so if anyone would like to discuss things with me or to get in contact with a league leader while I'm there, please let me know. In person contact is one of the things we're trying to foster.
 
Now THIS looks awesome! We don't have anything at the moment, but Crow350 and I threw around the idea of starting a Georgia Tech Pokemon league. We'll see what we can't stir up this year and join in on this!
 
I know for a fact El Scorcho has a pretty good thing going at the Oklahoma State University and quite a few people play there with him. I personally play here in Tulsa at Tulsa Community College, there are about 4 different campus locations, so hopefully i wouldnt be the only one of the 4 to play pokemon. If i can get more people from TCC i'd like to see a NCPA leage there
 
Excellent work guys! We're picking up steam fast. Mind you, this isn't gonna revolutionize your league affairs immediately, but it gives you a wider pool of talent to practice with since you can communicate with other leagues, maybe organize a friendly league crew battle :)
 
Great idea! I go to UCF (University of Central Florida), the 2nd-largest university in the country, and there's got to be some people there who would be interested. I know a few competitive battlers there, but none of them play doubles. There's also a handful of casual Pokémon fans on campus. Orlando is a big Pokémon area, but mainly for TCG.
 
Is it a bad thing that this makes me want to go back into schooling more than the whole education/career/thing does? So Jelous.
 
I've talked to most of the members of our group and everyone loves the idea. You can go ahead and mark down Oklahoma State University as being officially in.
 
Okay, if anyone is going to be at Nationals and wants to discuss what they think the NCPA should be, let me know and we can discuss in person. Also, with the exception of this weekend, I can often be found on various rooms on IRC like #smogonwifi and #smogon, amongst other channels.
 
I don't know if Luke/thamericandream would be interested in starting one in Madison but I'd be totally down to help out. It would be a great excuse to practice more.
 
I hate the current school my Master's is located at (it's private regardless and there's a grand total of me playing Pokemon in it), but I am interested in this regardless. So do you have any options for those of us not wishing to be alleged with a school?
 
Well crap. The Florida State Pokemon League is all about this! Unfortunately none of us read this until after Nationals. We tried to get an intercollegiate league started in Florida but it never panned out. Can't wait to hear more! Let us know if there is anyway we can help administration-wise.
 
Yeah, let's do this. As one of the oldest if not the oldest collegiate competitive pokemon leagues in the country, the FSPL is down.


I did want to address some of the points brought up in the topic as I have been a part of the environment you guys are talking about for quite some time now.

1. Playing face to face with local players will up your game. The discussion about mechanics and team building is second to none. Any FSPL player is usually leaps and bounds ahead of the average player in terms of mechanics and in game strategy because we've logged thousands of matches in Battle Revolution and have several tournaments, a lot of which force you to think out of the box. Nothing can really replace that kind of experience, I don't care how many Garchomps you're packing. Even though I won a stipend to go to Nats, I performed worse than every player on the team(7 others at nats) and I'm not ashamed to say that because they are all elite level players. That and I got the crap end of the stick...(Huy, roud 2?! Seriously!?!?!)

2. I will say this because I believe it to be fact. I have brought more members into the league than any other league member. So, for me, getting the word out has become second nature. I'm very used to talking to people about pokemon and siphoning the select few out of the masses to join the cause. I have a few ways that I do that and I would like to share them here because I would hope that this kind of information would serve to help other people expand their local pokemon scene. A. I have two FSPL (well, now 6 if you count the braviary ones) T-shirts and I wear them all the time around campus. If you didn't know what our T-shirts looked like we're wearing them in that picture and they have a Rapidash with Chief Osceola riding on it. The T-shit causes a lot of people to walk straight up to me and ask me about it. The answer varies depending on the response. If the response is, "awesome t-shirt dude, hell yeah rapidash" or something along those lines, I usually ask if they play pokemon and go from there. You have to let go of any fear of talking to people about pokemon. Hey, it's a part of your life, if you're not proud of it, why are you doing it? B. I see people playing their DS's around campus and I casually ask them what they are playing, if it was pokemon or if they played pokemon, we're in business and I would invite them out or tell them to add the facebook page. Back when the pokewalker was a thing, it was like fishing with dynamite. Players were so easy to find and talk to it was ridiculous. The existence of the pokewalker and the Rapidash T-shirt added more players to our league than anything else. C. Find out if your school has a game committee or game club and peacefully insert yourself in there. Through joint actions with the Florida State Game Committee, we were able to run a campus advertised tournament that sported over 60 players. Who won that tournament? THIS GUUUUYYYY.... Anywho, when it came down to brass tacks, FSPL players were the only people left in the brackets and aside from making our league look good, it made a lot of players come check us out and come out to Pokebattle Fridays, a weekly event where we sit around and play pokemon. D. And this is the last thing, while it doesn't happen as often as it used to because we lost battle revolution as a thing, F*&% YOU NINTENDO, we would have pokebattles every fridays to encourage players to come out talk pokemon, and leave it on the battlefield. This made our players better as a result and caused newer ones to join the ranks. I hope this helps.

One other thing we were planning was having a badge for people who beat us at VGC's. The Renegade badge was steve's idea and I still think it's a cool idea. Like, you would play people from other schools and after beating a certain number of players you get their badge. I was thinking about making a roller badge anytime someone bested me competitively. Just some food for thought. We had one of the original members go down to UCF and we were really trying to get him to start something there, but to no avail.
 
Hey guys this is Kevin Fisher, poké-poke, El-Scorcho's friend with the pink hair. This is my first post so please forgive me if I butcher it :D

I'm currently the vice president of the gaming club at OSU and help Scorcho run the Pokémon section of it. Our gaming club is the second largest organization on OSU's campus and I just figured I would try to give some guidelines to people just starting their organizations.

The best way I've found to get success in getting people together for something like this is first starting with mass advertising around campus, whether it be fliers, sidewalk chalk etc... Then secondly, try to make joining and participating as simple as possible, make everything you want to accomplish with your group crystal clear.

The most important thing I would say is: Make each person feel as if they belong and have a sense of worth in the club. Usually people will come to a first meeting and never come back because someone may have been rude or they weren't approached by anyone at all individually. Basically what I am saying is be as nice and understanding of each person's individual enjoyment of the game and try to involve EVERYONE, even if you have to be a little aggressive about it.

Also, a lot of people, if not all, joining the clubs will be casual players. Try not to overwhelm them and scare them off. On the first few meetings not to discuss high level meta, maybe start your meetings off with a fun multi-battle or little cup tournament. You might even find some of your casual players converted to high level players if they see your passion and drive for the game, Scorcho did it with me.

Ways to get people involved can range from having people participate with something art-related, such as t-shirt designs or possibly art competitions. In our pokémon club, we generally just have battles through a projector, but our battles aren't always serious. We sometimes battle with troll-builds we may have come up with that week, things like this inspire people who aren't very serious with pokémon.

Finally, a major part of making a successful club is to make sure and be consistent. Your weekly/monthly meetings should ALWAYS happen unless something major comes up, don't cancel meetings just because you wanted to take a nap.
 
Blades, holy shit that was inspirational. I'll be in contact with you probably about promotions around campus. Everyone else, I'll update the OP with potential schools, and shinyru, I will address you later today.
 
Blades, awesome stuff. I know exactly where you're coming from, as a fellow founder of a Pokemon Club that's seen a lot of growth. Though admittedly, I wouldn't say many of our players are elite level players (yet). We have about 4-5 that are pretty good though (I'm including myself in all of this).

By the way, University of Victoria is in. I know I posted on Facebook, but why not here as well.

One other thing we've done to promote Pokemon on campus and around the area, is at the local anime convention we've hosted a Pokemon League. How it works is players at the anime convention challenge our gym leaders for badges. If you manage to collect 8, then you earn the right to challenge the Elite 4 on the final day of the convention. And if two or more trainers beat the Elite 4 by some arbitrary time on the final day, then both must face off to see who becomes the League Champion.

It's a load of fun for the Gym Leaders as well, though admittedly the Elite 4 don't see much action. For the most part, we also try to use quirky ideas which are likely to get destroyed by a player that has even any clue of how to play. These also form the themes of the gyms and Elite 4, and we do have little 1" pins to hand out as badges sponsored by the convention. I imagine not everyone would be so lucky, but a $1-2 entry fee or something would probably suffice to cover costs. Players are getting swag from the league after all.

Either way, it's great exposure and there's obviously a great deal of overlap of interests between Pokemon Players and Anime fans. Definitely something to look into for clubs out there.
 
hey this sounds awesome. I go to Penn State and actually I started something similar to this 2 years ago. It's called the Intercollegiate Pokemon League (www.tipl.tk) and we have semester long competitive battling seasons. I actually posted here about it but it didn't go very far. We currently have four schools in total in our league, with a lot of interest growing. Maybe we could merge together or something. whoever is in charge of this should PM me :)
 
avdc90, Duy and I are currently the ones in charge. I can only speak for myself, but I want to get this up and running before we even think about merging, lest we accidentally cramp ourselves before we have a chance to get started.
 
that makes sense and i understand where you're coming from. we've been up and running for a while now and our next season starts next fall. if you guys or anyone else would like to join us, that would be awesome. i can say that Penn State would like to join your association for sure. we should talk about this, ill see if i can catch you on IRC sometime.
 
One other thing we were planning was having a badge for people who beat us at VGC's. The Renegade badge was steve's idea and I still think it's a cool idea. Like, you would play people from other schools and after beating a certain number of players you get their badge.
This is an amazingly epic idea, as soon as school starts back up the Poké-pokes will be working on making one.
 
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