Starting a Chess Team at Your Child’s School, Part 2
July 23, 2010
Tags: Teaching Chess Articles
Part 2: Taking Your Chess Team to the Next Level
Written by guest author Robert N. Bernard for Wholesale Chess.
Hold a Practice Tournament
After a month of meeting or so, organize a practice tournament among members of the team. You should make this as close as possible to a real chess tournament; each game should have a chess clock, touch-move, notation, and superb sportsmanship. Watch the games carefully, and note any problems. Invariably, many games of the games in the practice tournament will end quickly, with more than 80% of the clock time remaining on each side. Emphasize that for most moves of the game, you should take at least 30 seconds to decide on a move. One exercise that worked for me is to tell the kids that I want them to sit in silence with their eyes closed, and guess how long a minute is; when they think a minute is up, they should raise their hand. Then I say “Go!” and start timing a minute. You should then acknowledge who is closest, and who guessed too short or too long. The key is to tell the kids that in (many) tournaments, they have 30 minutes to make all their moves, and that most games between kids last about 30 moves, so they should be spending about one minute per move. This is a revelation to those kids whose games typically finish in under ten minutes.
Interesting Chess Team Activities
Team meetings later in the year can have other interesting activities. Have a consultation game, where all the members of the team play against you. Have a guess-the-move meeting, where you take a famous game, and have the kids guess the best move for each side. Have kids play in two teams against each other in consultation, but rotate which child on each team is the “final decider” of the move made (this gives weaker players a full stake in the decision making process).
Chess Tournaments
Once you’ve had a couple months of meetings, you are ready for your first tournament. How should you choose tournaments in which to play? First, check with a national chess association (United States Chess Federation or Chess-N-Math in Canada) which will provide a list of tournaments in your area. In the USA, each state has its own chess organization, which can point you to tournaments on a local level, some of which are very large.
United States Chess Federation
Also, Google “school chess tournaments” and your city, county, state, or province in order to get the names of other schools that already have chess teams. I have found that coaches of other schools are the best source of information for tournaments in the area. Note that many tournaments are for individuals only, and team tournaments are harder to find. I recommend to keep looking for your first tournament to be a team tournament, where the kids can root for each other.
Once you have found a tournament in which to play, you have to manage not only the kids (reading the pairing sheet, getting them to their boards), but also their parents. Parents (and coaches) of chess players are usually forbidden to watch their kids play (fears of signaling moves, unfortunately), which is different from every other sport there is, where the parents are watching intently all the action. The child is alone, and it can be frightening. Parents worry too, and will ask you all sorts of questions about Swiss system pairings, ratings, and your experience, as well as the ubiquitous question, “If my kid loses a game, will he be eliminated and have to go home?”
After the Tournament
Once a game is over, whether it be a win, draw, or loss for the child, as their coach, you have to pick them up or calm them down and get ready for the next game. While many coaches want to go over a child’s game in-between rounds, I do not; I encourage the kids to go outside and run around. Some kids will want to show their coach the game, which is fine, but I try to get them thinking about something besides chess for the few minutes they have in-between rounds.
After the first tournament is complete, publicize the results, even if the results were disappointing — get the announcement in the school newsletter, try and get a picture taken, emphasize the positive. Good results should be submitted to the local newspaper (where a high-quality picture will greatly increase the chance of it being published). Any of these ideas will benefit recruitment for the team in the future.
Coaching a chess team is extremely rewarding, and if you take up the gauntlet, I wish you the best of luck.
This is Part Two of Starting a Chess Team at You Child’s School. You should start by reading Part 1: Setting Up Your Chess Team.
Robert N. Bernard is the manager of the New Jersey Knockouts of the United States Chess League, where he started three years ago as the Knockouts’ blogger. For the USCL, he also compiles an unofficial rating list and weekly power rankings. Frequently, he can be found on the Internet Chess Club, where he has a weird tendency to win a lot of their trivia contests. He is also a member of the United State Chess Federation’s Ratings Committee and coaches his son’s chess team. He has a very nice plaque from the 1982 US Amateur Team Championship, where he captained the team that won the Under 1400 prize.
