VP of the DoC: Inside my 1st Year as Wizards Co-Captain

Here’s the Tik Tok length version of this post.  I did not get to go on Roham’s yacht, I wasn’t paid gobs of money and my pack luck is still just as bad as it was before.  Now if you’re here for the real experience, let’s jump in.

Sometime in the early fall, the current District of Collectors co-captain (shoutout SDA) was stepping down to focus more on the Collectin and Connectin community, creating an opportunity for a new co-captain to step in.  I had been getting more and more into the DoC over the previous few months, along with my growing Wizards fandom getting stronger and my continued desire to find ways to produce content.  I was growing pretty active in a community that I really enjoyed being a part of and jumped at the opportunity to try to help grow the Wizards community as a leader.

In what felt like a perfect role out of the gates, our fearless leader Top Shot Wizard handed over the reigns of the DoC Flash Challenges to me with basically total free reign, outside of not promising legendary moments as rewards each FC.  I loved the flash challenges the DoC had put on dating back to last year, especially given Top Shot basically dropped them all together this year.  I wanted to find a way to take what was working and put a unique spin on it.  The concept of the themed flash challenges was born, with intent to leverage telling more stories and letting Wizards collectors dig back into their collections for previous seasons’ moments, while still being relevant to the game going on that night.  We launched the DoC blog (which I wish I wrote more on) and added weekend benders later on, so we could run the flash challenge out over the whole weekend.  Side note – a big thank you to anyone who commented, participated or engaged in a flash challenge!  That was my favorite part of the job this year.

Maybe one of the coolest things I got to be a part of this year was back in January; helping with our in person DoC meet up event against the now contender Timberwolves.  One of our most active DoC members, Daniel Slawinski was making a trip from across the pond in Europe for a week and was catching a pair of Wizards games.  We designed the meet up around his trip with 10 DoC members sharing the experience of ripping team packs, watching the Wizards, unfortunately the absolute dominance of Anthony Edwards and enjoying stories and drinks at the best “dive” bar around.  Seriously, if you’ve never been to Jackpot before or after a Wizards game, it’s a must do.  It was awesome being able to help plan this with TSW and see it come to life with so many people having a great time because of Top Shot.

Let’s peel back the curtain a little bit.  From the Top Shot side, I got added into an incredible community of other captains.  There are a ton of people out there working the captains program who are so passionate about their team, communities and growing the Top Shot product; it is inspiring to be a part of.  We have a Discord where we can bounce ideas off each other, knowledge share, gripe, occasionally talk smack and provide ideas/feedback to someone from Top Shot who listens to us.  There is not much in the way of Top Shot hand holding or rules saying we can not do something.  It really is a journey we can shape however we want with our monthly allocations and decisions we make.  A big appreciation to Top Shot for increasing the monthly kicker half way through the season at our requests!  We have town halls once in awhile to go over community related topics, but we don’t have insider trading knowledge (a shame I know).

It got me into Fast Break slightly earlier than the general public, so that was a neat plus.  We’re pushing for favorite team locking and always trying to find ways to reward people dedicated to their favorite team’s community.  It’s been a great forum to try to raise awareness for getting people’s pack ripping and tweets about the games they went to thanks to Top Shot retweeted and more awareness.  Some teams share stories of great engagement with the team embracing Top Shot, like the Blazers; which is awesome to see and a personal goal / desire that we can raise with the Wizards organization one day.  I am not in the Nine Lives Lounge (yet), but suspect it runs very similar to how that does without the perks of say the VIP lounge.

I’ve gotten sucked into Discord way more than I ever cared to be, watched a ton of Wizards moments for the Flash Challenges, met some great new people and felt pain when the Wizards traded away Daniel Gafford.  We had Bilal mania, which only was beat by Wembymania.  We loved, hated and loved Jordan Poole together, had to google half our roster some nights, actually wanted a Marvin Bagley moment and experienced Bradley Beal in a different uniform.  We had flash challenges crashed by Patrick Baldwin Jr, Jordan Butler and Deni rares.  We voted for FC reqs from the game in Discord, never hit a single “if the Wizards win” prop req that I can remember and raided opposing Discords with wands after we did win.  I think the Hawks and Heat fans definitely did not appreciate that time honored tradition we created.

At the end of the year, my main reflection is that it has been a pleasure to be able to help try to shape and craft the future of the District of Collectors.  Top Shot Wizard and SDA are two great community members dedicated to the cause to grow this thing and I know even though he bleeds CnC orange now, SDA still always favors the DoC community.  My goals as we head into the Wizards playoff season as it has been termed, aka the NBA Draft, is to try to find engaging ways with TSW to keep the DoC community interesting until we get back into our inevitable year of the Wizards in 2024-2025 for our pending playoff run.  We may not be the biggest community, but that doesn’t mean we can’t strive to be one of the best.  The goal of Top Shot is to be fun and to grow your fandom.  I hope somewhere along the way everyone in the DoC has enjoyed Wizards’ basketball a little more this year because of NBA Top Shot and the DoC community!

Until next time, we ride at dawn…