We are excited to offer the FINAL (fourth overall) tournament in a series of virtual tournaments for UIL journalism competition. Pocket Coach Academy is pleased to offer the first scholarship-qualifying tournaments offered virtually and asynchronously specifically for UIL-style journalism.

This tournament will feature TWO separate divisions. The first division, Scholarship, is for our previous tournament qualifiers. The other, Regional, is for students looking to get some extra practice before UIL Regional competition. The Scholarship division is only open for students who qualified at previous tournaments. Anyone is eligible to enter the regional competition, though we think it works best for regional qualifiers.

Students will get the opportunity to compete in Copy Editing, News Writing, Feature Writing, Editorial Writing, and Headline Writing.

Watch this Video for all the details about the PCA Virtual Journalism Series!

Welcome to the PCA Journalism Virtual Tournament Series

How does this work?

Sponsors will receive the prompts on a Monday morning. They then have over one week to write and submit their students' work. Our first, initial deadline will be the following Tuesday afternoon at 5pm for each paper to be submitted. Sponsors will receive a competition code through Tabroom (located on their entry list) and then upload each piece of writing through a Google Form (sent out with the prompts).

Our judges will receive the papers on Tuesday evening and we will have them back to PCA Sunday evening. That Monday morning, we will send out results and feedback. Each paper will be rated by judges and receive comments.

First, second, and third place papers in the scholarship division will receive a cash prize!

The prompts will be created by PCA staff and mirror a UIL-style prompt.

What is the cost?

Each entry will be $16. There are no other fees associated with this event and sponsors are not expected to judge.

What are the entry limits?

We will limit each event to 150 entries initially. If we have the ability to expand that, we will. All entries will be waitlisted until two weeks before the papers are due. At that point, we will be letting entries in based on their registration date. Subscribers to the Journalism Academy will be given first opportunity to compete.

Timeline for Tournament #4

• Tuesday, March 3 - Registration Opens
• Monday, April 7 - Prompts emailed to sponsors via Tabroom. Entries locked.
• Monday, April 14 - Last day to add an entry.
• Tuesday, April 15 - Each paper must be submitted by 5pm via the Google Form sent out to sponsors.
• Tuesday, April 15-Sunday, April 20- Judges grade papers.
• Tuesday, April 22 - Feedback and ratings published for sponsors. Qualifiers announced.

We look forward to providing this opportunity to your students!