Spotlight Series #4: Melina Kingsley

This month, Sable Creech interviews Melina Kingsley, and learns about their personal Professor journey from Poké Kid to League Leader, US-Central RPC, and international-level TCG Judge.

Who is Melina Kingsley?

I am a Professor in the Pokémon community! I have been doing this only for a couple of years now. I think I started in 2021, so I guess it's coming up on four years, and I've been really enjoying it.

I work as an R&D chemist as my day job, and then I work weekends doing local League, which is a lot of fun. I really enjoy doing bullet journaling. That's kind of one of my main hobbies, which is pretty dorky, but I like it nonetheless. 

So what really got you started with Pokémon as a franchise?

Pretty much my entire family was into Pokémon, and when you're the youngest kiddo and you see your whole family kind of doing this thing, you're like, “I want to get in on it.” 
I remember I was like four-ish or five-ish, I was constantly begging my family to let me go with them to Pokémon League. My dad was like, “Well, you don't really know how to read yet and your reading skills probably need a bit of work, so once once you get to a certain level, we'll let you come with us.” And so, I started going to League with them after I passed a good reading exam. That became my entire childhood. I did weekly League, and I oftentimes had to choose between going to soccer practice and going to Pokémon League. I just spent pretty much my entire childhood doing it because the whole family was into it. It made it really easy to dive head first into Pokémon as a whole.

How did you go from there to being an RPC today? What did that path look like?

I played TCG competitively from about 2005 until 2014 Worlds, the last event that I did before I went on a brief hiatus. Then I started high school. I still loved Pokémon as a franchise from afar. My lock screens were different Pokémon, I played all the games, and even when I got to college, I went to a couple of pre-releases but didn't really get much into it.

Post-COVID, my local game store was looking for a League Leader, and one of the people that was working there was a close friend of mine. They knew about my history with the TCG, and they asked if I would be willing to come in and help them with getting all of that going. I said yes because I was like, “I don't have a job during the semester right now.” I was in my last year of college. I started helping out at the weekly League there.

And then as official play came back, we really grew pretty rapidly, which was really fun and exciting – just getting the experience of getting more players and learning all of what it took to really get things off the ground. I had initially been like, “Oh, this will just be like a quick side thing that's fun to do because I have a history with the game.” And then after meeting people and hanging out with the League and really getting to know a lot of people in the community, I completely fell back in love with the game.

I played in NAIC 2022, and that just absolutely sprouted my love for larger events. I decided that I really wanted to try to judge at the larger event level, so I applied for Salt Lake City 2022-23. That was my first event, and I've kind of just kept doing them since then. I got to judge NAIC my first year, and then had good luck being able to judge Worlds and NAIC again this past year. And on top of all of that, I have some background in managing communities. I ran a club in college that was about 300 people, and I helped do weekly events for multiple different subsets of the group. I think the combination of those things made me a decent candidate for RPC.

You were brought on as RPC as part of the most recent waves of additions. How has that been as a new RPC? Were there any surprises?

I don't think that there was much of anything that came as a major surprise. I think that overall it's been really great.

One of the very positive surprises was having the release of ProfCOM because that makes it much easier to have visibility  in my region, especially since the US-Central region has a lot of rural communities. It's really awesome to have that. I think that was definitely a positive surprise.

What really drove you to say “Yes, RPC is for me.”? What are your hopes and dreams and goals with it?

I really, really care about the Pokémon community. I'm not joking when I say it raised me. It was my entire childhood. I don't know who I would be if Pokémon wasn't a part of my life. It's one of those things where the local level is obviously where I got started, and I think that one of the most important parts of the Pokémon community is having that strong local presence. I think it's awesome because no two Leagues are exactly the same. And so, you can get so much diversity.

The thing that was most important to me was the outreach, the community building, making sure that people feel supported in their local endeavors. I grew up in a very small town. I had to drive 30 minutes to get to the closest Pokémon League to us. When we started playing competitively, we would regularly drive an hour or two hours or three hours to get to events. I definitely understand some of the harder parts of it with having to navigate how to get the outreach that you need to build a community and have them come to your events. I think for me, it was really just a matter of wanting to help in any way that I can to foster that for people.

Speaking of outreach, you had a meet and greet at the end of November for Professors within your region. How did that go? 

I was so pleasantly surprised with how it turned out. I really, really had a great time. We had two Professors that drove over two hours to be there with us, which is just astounding that people cared enough. I think one of the best parts for me was a couple of the people that attended were thosethat had reached out to me right when I got the position and had mentioned, “Hey, I don't really have a lot of other Professors in my area, so I don't really have a lot of people to talk to. It's great that we have you as a resource.”

The thing that definitely made me feel best about the meet and greet was getting to connect people that are closer to each other. We were able to get them set up in a way that they could communicate effectively with one another. There were offers of, “If you want to come judge at our events so that you can get a little practice,” or, “If you ever want to talk about players or talk about rulings, we’re here.” They were all very open to building those connections. I think it was really great because we had a mix of people; some that had been in the community for a while, and there were some people that were only in the program from September to November. So it was just super awesome to have so many people that came out.

We had eight people, which might not sound like a lot for some of the larger regions, but I think is an excellent turn out for the rural areas. It was really great to be able to see people, meet people, talk face-to-face, give advice, and answer questions. I had a little presentation, and people seemed receptive to it. It was a really great event, and I really hope to be able to host more. I have the kind of crazy, far-off goal of wanting to do one in every state that is in my region, but that's a lot to try to fit in between now and September, I think.

What tips do you have for Professors wanting to reach out within those rural communities?

In general, something that is still really good is the Event Locator. You can get the tournament organizer’s e-mail typically and be able to reach out in that way.

And the other half of that is making sure that if you're running events, you are posting them to help make sure that they’re visible to people. I also think that an untapped market is Facebook – there are often places for buy/sell/trade groups in your area. Sometimes you can find people that are more involved with the game.

ProfCOM, ever since it's come out, has been great. Before, I had only had contact with one professor in Nebraska, and now I have access to even more people that are in that area. As more people get involved with it, then you can also have that ability to reach out to people.

You'd mentioned early on that one of your hobbies outside of Pokémon is bullet journaling; do you think there’s a spot for Professors to be able to incorporate that into planning or reflection of events?

Absolutely! Oh my goodness, I think the best thing about bullet journaling is that it is so flexible. I typically have a weekly tracker of just all of the different events going on so I can track my events. I also do daily reflections in the bullet journal as a part of it. “Here's how the event went today.”

And then, using it as a place to store some of the feedback that you can get, whether that be sort of an official capacity with P.E.R.F.s, or if you're talking with one of your team members after the event and they let you know that you did a really great job. You can mark that down as one of your strengths, and then you can use that to look back on later and use that for doing applications. And then also, if they give you critical feedback, like, “Hey, I really think that you should focus on doing this,” then you can also use that to guide your learning and your development as a Professor. So I think that there's a lot that is doable in merging the two things together since it is so modular and easy to adapt as necessary.