The Origin Story!

C.A.T.S. started as a university group meeting up once a week to watch anime​ and prove to each other that

being a nerd is not only a good thing, but something to be celebrated.​

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We attended our first anime convention together in 2009.  Most of us entered that hallowed space of pop culture shenanigans shy and unsure of what we were walking into.  The day after getting home, we were already making plans for the next one.

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Later that year, we attended Colossalcon in Sandusky, Ohio (long before it was known as PRIME).  There, we preformed our very first panel, a tribute to LittleKuriboh, the creator of Yu-gi-oh! the Abridged Series.  This panel was born from one member's obsession with the series, going on and on to her friends how and why it was so awesome.  After her fangirling was done, her friends pointed out that she had just proven that she could do panels.  That first panel was riddled with technical issues, but it was so much fun to share our obsession with our audience.

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We built ourselves up over the next 20 years, each of the members of our group creating and preforming as many panels as we could get on the schedule, ranging from fun discussion-based gatherings on how anime conventions first got started to over-analyzed presentations on what makes a princess a princess under the mouse's rules of royalty.   

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We looked around and saw all these other official groups doing the same thing we've been doing for years.  People started recognizing us from previously panels and asked us if we had a website.  The reception was getting so wonderful that we thought "let's make it official!"  All we really needed was a name...

 

We knew we wanted to something that expressed how we love conventions and presenting things that also educational.  So, we came up with Con Academy.  That's great and all but it still didn't feel quite complete.  That's when one of our members discovered that if we added a word starting with "T" then we would be C.A.T.  This would greatly please the one member of the group that is obsessed with cats and a good acronym can make or break you LOL.  But it still didn't feel complete...

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One of our members is in a writing group.  So, she took this issue to her people.  This creative group of people took 20 minutes and ran with the assignment, coming up with all kinds of fun phrases to fit out acronym.  And that's when it happened... someone suggested adding the "S" and something finally clicked.

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Thus, Con Academy: Teaching the Stuff (C.A.T.S.) was born.

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