Meet Your Neighbor: Wrenshall’s Valerie Coit pieces together world’s puzzlers

WRENSHALL — When Valerie Coit moved to the Duluth area in 1999, she’d never heard of competitive jigsaw puzzling. She’d work on a puzzle with friends or family but never timed.

It wasn’t until she went to a puzzle contest hosted by J. Skylark Toy Store during Red Flannel Days in Canal Park that she discovered her love for the activity.

“We went and we participated and we came in second,” said Coit, of Wrenshall. “And we got so excited. None of us have ever been good at a sport before and we’re like, ‘OK, we’ve found our thing.'”

Since then Coit started seeking

puzzle competitions.

She’d travel to the annual contest in St. Paul during the Winter Carnival and formed a team with friends. She said she got

interested in the activity

at the right time because it has recently grown exponentially.

“It’s exploded. If you wanted to do speed puzzling now, you could participate in a contest almost every weekend,” Coit said. “Either in-person or virtually. There’s a lot more opportunity now than when I first got started.”

And new to the competitive puzzling world was the creation five years ago of the

World Jigsaw Puzzle Championships

in Valladolid, Spain. Coit and her team heard about it after the fact in 2019 and signed up to play in 2020. The pandemic derailed the competition that year, but the team was able to compete in 2022.

“I was terrible. I was not a good individual competitor,” Coit said. “But the team I was on placed 12th, so we felt really good about that.”

While she was preparing and dealing with the delay of Worlds in 2020, Coit and several other people had reached out to the organizer of the world championships, Alfonso Alvarez-Ossorio, about the United States not having a national association.

“I just thought, that’s weird. A lot of other games or sports have associations like chess or bridge,” Coit said. “So a bunch of us asked about how we could form one and Alfonso just kind of shared all our contact info and we got on a Zoom call in January 2020 to form the U.S. Jigsaw Puzzle Association.”

The timing worked out as jigsaw puzzling exploded during the pandemic. The association started hosting virtual competitions to get people started. Coit and others worked on forming the nonprofit, and within a few months, everything was up and running. Coit is a co-founder and board member of the U.S. Jigsaw Puzzle Association.

Contributed / Valerie Coit

But Coit’s work with the U.S. association isn’t why she’s so well-known in the puzzle world. She’s better known for providing an English commentary livestream during the past two years of the world championship competition. In 2022, she hosted a livestream as part of the U.S. national championship and the world championship organizer reached out to see if she’d do it again for worlds.

Over the five days of the competition, Coit interviewed puzzle influencers, talked with past and current champions and added commentary on the current puzzle competition. How does one prepare to provide 38 hours of livestreaming commentary?

“I pretty much consumed nothing but puzzle content,” Coit said. “I’d dig through the national championships to figure out who were the contenders, watch a lot of Instagram content creators and took a lot of notes.”

Coit said this year’s contest had representatives from 79 countries. Not all of them had information out there ahead of time, but she said she did what she could to research.

Contributed / Valerie Coit

Coit co-hosted the livestream last year with a consistent host, but this year she hosted solo with several temporary co-hosts throughout the day.

“It was fun to bring them in and let them provide the color commentary about what they were seeing,” Coit said. “And since there are long periods of time when people aren’t necessarily finishing a puzzle, we’d learn about puzzling in their country or what they do as content creators.”

Thanks to her livestream commentary over the past two years, Coit is now what she refers to as “puzzle famous.”

“I’m slightly famous in a very specific niche realm,” Coit said. “People would come up and talk to me like they’ve known me forever because they’ve spent a lot of time listening to me. I cherish that and I love it. But honestly, the people who are the real celebrities are the super speedy puzzlers.”

Coit said she sometimes feels a little starstruck around the fast puzzlers like Kathi Reiner, a speed puzzler from Germany who finished a 500-piece puzzle in under 27 minutes.

“It’s just mind-blowing to watch,” Coit said. “When you watch the competitors like that, you can’t even comprehend how they’re able to do it so quickly.”

As she’s become more involved in the puzzling world, Coit said her own puzzling has fallen off a bit. So when she finds time between her work as a communications professional at the Swenson College of Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota Duluth and her duties in the U.S. Association and commentary personality, she’ll work a puzzle from the previous world championship.

“One of the forms of payment I get from worlds is to take the puzzles home from the competition,” Coit said. “Since last year, I’ve maybe gotten three of them done from the massive stack. But it’s still fun to do when I can find the time.”

Teri Cadeau is a features reporter for the Duluth News Tribune. Originally from the Iron Range, Cadeau has worked for several community newspapers in the Duluth area, including the Duluth Budgeteer News, Western Weekly, Weekly Observer, Lake County News-Chronicle, and occasionally, the Cloquet Pine Journal. When not working, she’s an avid reader, crafter, dancer, trivia fanatic and cribbage player.