You don't get much more n00b than someone who has
never played an online FPS-type game before...but if some cannon fodder could be of use, I'd like to give this a shot.
I've gone through the Basic Training that they give for Soldier, Spy, and Engineer (are there others?), and will look at the wiki pages referenced above. I've also played some "Offline Training" matches against the computer, but I haven't asked for coaching.
I'm a bit confused on the time thing. I think I'd be UTC/GMT-5 (Eastern) but I read the deadline as "Saturday" and "August 16"--and those two things descriptions seem to match. Am I missing something?