Dear WCA Community,

Another year has passed and we are very grateful for the enthusiasm of our community throughout 2022! After two years of limited competitions, this year brought a resurgence of cubing in many areas of the world, leading to 1,069 competitions held across 86 countries. Over 26,020 new competitors competed at those events and the competitions continued to fill up quickly due to the demand, the fastest being filled in just 33 seconds! Competitions became even more exciting due to the records that were broken throughout the year with a total of 3,049 National Records, 216 Continental Records, and 46 World Records being set in 2022. We also welcomed seven new Regional Organizations from around the world which will improve the planning of competitions in those areas going forward.

We are thankful for the careful planning of the organizers for our Continental Championships series that happened this year where we had six successful competitions! The organization of these events would not have been possible without the help of the RUBIK'S CUBE® team and their sponsorship of the competitions as well. We hope you were able to attend an event or watch streams of the action live!

On the administrative side, an astounding number of volunteers stepped up to give their time to the WCA through Staff and Delegate positions which greatly improved the functions of our organization. For every call for applicants that we made for any position, we received incredible numbers of applications from people who had never held a position in the WCA before and we were able to grow most of our teams in a significant way. Overall, we welcomed 53 new Committee/Team members and three Committee/Team leaders. We also saw changes in the Board of Directors this year with the addition of two new Board members, Blake Thompson and Somya Srivastava and the re-election of Callum Goodyear. We also had fantastic numbers of Delegate promotions with the promotions of two Senior Delegates, 18 Delegates, 93 Junior Delegates, and 132 Trainee Delegates. All of these volunteers make our work possible and we cannot thank anyone who volunteers any amount of their time to the WCA enough for their contributions!

With the additional help from new members, our Committees and Teams accomplished so much in 2022! The WCA Communication Team posted over 85 times on social media, the WCA Advisory Committee oversaw over 4,600 posts and 340 topics on the WCA Forum, the WCA Marketing Team had over 13,000 views across the WCA merchandise, and the WCA Software Team had 171 merged Pull Requests and 103 translation updates. Despite the increase of competitions, the WCA Competition Announcement Team vastly decreased the time it took for them to approve competitions, dropping the average time to 34.9 hours, and the WCA Results Team posted competitions results in 8.49 hours on average, also an incredible improvement with the addition of new team members. The WCA Marketing Team also kept up with the purchasing of timer and display system requests for competition organizational teams by fulfilling 58 gear orders, which was substantially more than in previous years. The WCA Regulations Committee released updated Regulations in June and the WCA Executive Assistants Team kept track of all of the organizational changes and announcements internally throughout the year, which was a lot to manage! On top of it all, there was also an addition of two new Teams this year, the WCA Sports Organization Team and the WCA Archive Team which we are happy to welcome to the organization and will respectively help fulfill our vision for the future and keep a record of our past. Just as important is the work of the WCA Disciplinary Committee, the WCA Ethics Committee, the WCA Financial Committee, the WCA Quality Assurance Committee, and the WCA Board who support the WCA immensely everyday.

Going into 2023, we are still trying to find ways to make our organization the best it can be and we want to hear from everyone in the community about their experience so far through our Community Survey. Make sure you fill that out by January 15th! We anticipate another thrilling World Championship in Seoul, Republic of Korea this year that we hope to see you attend or watch from home. May the new year bring everyone joy and success at cubing competitions and beyond. Thank you all for your incredible support of the WCA, we could not do this without our community. Have a happy 2023!