North American ICPC participants were all ready to go to Orlando, Florida for a week-long event including NAPC (North America Programming Camp) and NAC (North America Championship), which will decide the 2021 World Finalists from North America. With less than a week's notice, and after all travel plans were arranged by the teams, the following announcement was made.

Dear NAC — NAPC Participant,

Due to the surge in COVID-19 cases across the country and, in particular, the region surrounding the event location, the 2021 North America Programming Camp (NAPC) and North America Championship (NAC) events will be conducted virtually. Registration fees paid by NAPC teams will be refunded. The health of our participants, university partners, and all of our communities is always our top priority.

Though conducted virtually, the NAPC-NAC will take place in the same timeframe (8-15 Aug.) with largely the same schedule as originally scheduled. We will finalize these details in the coming days and share them with you as soon as possible. In the meantime, we ask that you continue to fully reserve this week in your schedule so you can attend all required events. The organizers and trainers are working to make sure the remote NAPC-NAC provides excellent training and great competition.

In addition to great training and competition, the NAPC-NAC will include opportunities for interacting with sponsors, including networking events and a career fair. If you are a contestant, please make sure to upload your resume to your user profile at https://icpc.global no later than 6 Aug. ICPC and UCF would like to extend thanks to the event sponsors: National Security Agency (NSA), Universal Parks & Resorts, Orange County, L3Harris, Florida High Tech Corridor, Northrup Grumman, the Royal Bank of Canada, JetBrains, AWS Educate, IBM Quantum, Deviation Games, and Two Sigma.

We appreciate your understanding in these challenging times.

Here are some challenges NAC participants face as a result of this late announcement:

• Flights to Orlando were already purchased by nearly all teams where they face a quick decision of whether to cancel flights or to go anyway either due to lack of alternative housing, or hopes of meeting contestants unofficially.
• A week is a long commitment for many people, such as those working a full time job after graduation. Must they take a week of vacation time to attend required zoom meetings?
• The contest format is uncertain with extremely little time to prepare. Is it suddenly changing to 3 computers per team and any practice expecting the traditional format was wasted?

This is a very frustrating change of plans to everyone involved to say the least. What is your opinion about this announcement? How are your plans affected if you are involved in this event? Let's discuss in the comments.