29th September 2001

It all started when Wizards announced that there wouldn't be any European Qualifier for the ECSTS 2001.
I was very angry, because I had won Norway's ECSTS 2000 Qualifier, and why shouldn't we get to play this year too?
SauroN made a topic called "Scandinavian STS".
I and Jona Asih, both Scandinavians (me being norwegian and Jona being finnish) joined his discussion.
SauroN became 2nd at last year's swedish STS Q and was enraged that he couldn't get a revange this year.

At that point, when we discussed, someone said a comment about: "you european people... hehe... why don't you make
your own 'Team Europe'?
It was just meant as a kind of a joke from an outsider, but I got an idea.
And idea on how to get our Qualifiers back.
What we needed was many, many people like us.
A community. And a good community.
I created a wepage (http://home.online.no/~eovestre/pokemon/europe_team.html) with my own thoughts about Wizard's
decision and made a list of people who agreed and wanted the STS Qs back.
On that list, I placed a Golduck to the right of my name because... I'm Golduck.
But when Jonah and Michel joined fast and got their own Pokémon to the right of their names, it followed like that.
Now every single member has a picture of a Pokémon.

We send hundreds of letters and mails to Wizards.
We waited and waited, and got no answer.
But then I got one e-mail from Wizards in my mailbox a cold spring morning.
And guess what? They HAD CHANGED THEIR MINDS!
They announced that there would be STS Qualifiers in Europe again!
There you see people! It helps when you really try something really hard.
But Team Europe didn't vanish because we got it like we wanted.
We're as active as ever.
But instead of begging for Qualifiers, we now have other things to do.
We have meetings at Qualifiers, we discuss things about European tournaments and we always bring eachother the freshest
infos with our regular "[Team Europe] Topics" at Wizpog (aka Wizard's Pokégym).
We've also had an Apprentice tournament, and more will follow.

And we're always very proud when one of us wins a Qualifier.
We're getting some people to WCSTS now:
-Me
-Michel B
-Freddy K
And more will follow!

Thank you for reading,

Eskil Vestre
"Golduck" from Wizpog & Team Europe
--------------------
Known as Dark Golduck on Pojo's EZ Board
TDLOTE
(The Dark Leader Of Team Europe)
Be sure to check out Team Europe now:
http://home.online.no/~eovestre/pokemon/europe_team.html
Posts: 295 | From: Fjellstrand, Norway | Registered: Feb 2001  |  IP: Logged