NoVA North Tournament Logistics

Sunday, March 18, 2018

TJ High School for Science and Technology

6560 Braddock Road, Alexandria, VA 22312

Hello everyone,

First and foremost, I’d like to thank you all for your patience and understanding this season as we’ve changed not only dates for the tournament but locations as well. It has been quite a roller coaster! Unfortunately, hosting the tournament on a Sunday was unavoidable this year, but we look forward to going to back to our regularly scheduled Saturday tournament next year.

On to the logistics for Sunday…this is long but please read all the way through.

Map & Schedule

Since we are at a new school, we have uploaded a new map to our website. You can find it here; it will tell you exactly where to enter for team check-in and which doors to use for your prop delivery.

The schedule for the tournament, with the new rooms attached, can be found here.

Parking

TJ HSST has a fair amount of parking, but as always, we (strongly) encourage you to carpool as much as you can. We are allowed to use the parking lots at Holmes Middle School for overflow parking, if needed.

Concessions

We are delighted to announce that the Booster Club at TJ HSST will be providing our concessions service this year. They will have tables set up in the cafeteria, as well as near the Team Check-In area, and in the Auditorium lobby. In addition to food concessions, they will be offering some TJ HSST spirit-wear for all future prospective TJ HSST students!

The TJHSST Boosters will be providing snacks and pizza at the tournament.  They are taking pre-orders for pizza. Please see the link below for more information:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScEPFs0iqP8RCFjaFIBtu-74crRl510F0eCAplt-YP8UHsApA/viewform?usp=sf_link

Closing Ceremony

This year, our closing ceremony will take place at 6 pm in the Auditorium at the school. We did try to move it up as far as we thought we could because we understand that Sunday is a school night. We will try to move it along as quickly as possible, but we do want to take time to celebrate the achievements of our many teams.

Again, we’d like to thank you for your patience and understanding–and from many of you, your encouraging notes of support and offers of help while we worked through this. We look forward to seeing you all on Sunday!

~NoVA Board

—

Hello all!

As you can imagine, it’s been a stressful day as we’ve been monitoring the weather and the situation with Fairfax County Schools. Just when we thought we were in the clear to run the tournament at the planned start time, we received an update letting us know that the schools will remain closed until 12 noon tomorrow, with an additional update planned at 11 am.

At this time, we will still be running the tournament. Please add 5 hours to your scheduled start-time to obtain your new start-time (for both Long Term and Spontaneous). For example, if you were to start a performance at 8:30 am, your new start time will be 1:30 pm. We are feverishly working to get an updated schedule posted to our site, but please plan to start 5 hours later than originally planned. Should FCPS decide, at 11 am or before, that they will not be opening the schools for the day, we will provide an additional update as quickly as we can. If the district decides that they will not be opening the schools tomorrow, we will have to cancel the tournament in its current form and figure out a plan C.

We will run the tournament through the evening, and we expect the last teams to be finished performing at about 8 pm. Because of this, we will not be holding a closing ceremony but we will post the winners to our website.

I understand this may cause some concerns, and please know that if we had any other option, we would explore it. It takes about a year to plan a tournament, with that much lead time needed to find a suitable site in FCPS. We know that all of our teams have worked so hard, and we’re trying to do the best we can to allow our teams to compete.

Many thanks in advance for your cooperation and understanding.

~NoVA North Board