SEATTLE — The North American Sector of the International Cribbage Association formally designated Ms. Alicia Lake of Seattle as the sanctioned mentee of Level 3 holder Mr. Tony Cullen, in ceremonies conducted Saturday at the Pacific Northwest Federation headquarters. The designation is the first under the Association’s mentor-mentee framework in which a Level 3 holder has accepted a female mentee, and the first in which the sanctioning paperwork has been filed in the same calendar week in which the request was received.
Ms. Lake, an emerging player of marked promise in the Pacific Northwest competition circuit over the preceding three years, had been the subject of attention from several Level 3 holders since the Vancouver Open of 2016. Mr. Cullen’s formal designation, communicated to the Sector by letter in August last, was received with what the Sector chairman characterised in his Saturday remarks as “a sense of historical occasion.”
“The talent is there, plainly,” Mr. Cullen told the assembly. “The work, the rigour, the institutional understanding — these I shall now have the privilege of instilling. The Association will be the better for it. I do not say this lightly. I say it because I have seen what Alicia Lake is, and I am uniquely positioned, at this point in my own career, to bring her forward.”
Ms. Lake, in remarks delivered after Mr. Cullen, struck a tone of practised humility. “To accept the mentorship of Tony Cullen is to accept an obligation that exceeds, by a considerable margin, any private ambition,” the new mentee said. “I think of the small children who will, in time, look up to me as I now look up to my mentor; I think of the federated structure into which I have now been brought in a more formal capacity; and I am, in the proper sense, humbled.”
Executive Director Thornenberg, in a written message read to the assembly, congratulated both parties. “The Association recognises in this designation the union of two careers that, separately, would have honoured the federated game, and that together promise to define a generation,” the Director wrote. The Director was unable to attend in person owing to a prior commitment at the Suckling House Secretariat.
The mentorship engagement is anticipated, on past Sector practice, to run a minimum of five years before the mentee stands for formal elevation in her own right.
Mr. D. Ronne (Pi Level, 3.14, since MMXXV) remains the lowest-ranked individual ever inducted into the Association, and had not at the date of the events here described been inducted at any rank.
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