Hi all,
I am looking at different ideas to help us boost participation from the collegiate crowd and get better involvement. Has anyone used a grand-prix system, that is a system based upon participation points in a chess related activity? If so, could you please direct me to some documentation for review?
Any advice would be much appreciated.
Gregory
Gregory, you need only look at your home state for an example. Washington and Oregon have had this for years.
Thanks Mulfish. I will check out NW chess.
Ky Scholastic Chess cEnter in Louisville is doing that with a series of schoalstic events. Go to kychesscenter.com and click on Grand Prix to see what they are doing.
Also we have another organizer doing it with weekly events through the summer - again focused on scholastics.
We have had a Grand Prix for the series of scholastic tournaments that we run during the school year.
Oklahoma also has a scholastic Grand Prix with info at
okschess.org/grandprix
Mike Swatek
OSCO Secretary
Nebraska has had a ‘Player of the Year’ system for nearly 20 years, the winner qualifies for the Nebraska Closed Championship.
Bill Goichberg has been advocating a Junior Grand Prix for a while, but (IMHO) has yet to come up with one that is both easily implementable and has identifiable and quantifiable goals to monitor whether it accomplishes those goals (and at what cost.)
Those could be a challenge at the collegiate level, too.
(The Chess Cafe Grand Prix takes at least 2 days of staff time per month to keep the data up-to-date and accurate, and that doesn’t count staff time for TLAs.)
One thing we do not have reliable data on is which of our members are in college or in the military. I’m getting ready to modify the ‘address update’ form (currently in the Members Only area) to add a new ‘public contact information’ field, if we could agree on how to store someone’s collegiate status and/or military status in a way that makes them useable, we could make those self-reported fields.
I seem to recall that the Delegates approved one such system several years ago, called the "USCF Petit Prix" or something similar. Non-Grand-Prix tournaments could elect to note on their TLAs that they were contributing an additional fifty cents(?) per player to the Health and Benefits Fund when the rating report was sent to the USCF, similar to the way Grand Prix tournaments contribute $1 per player to become "Enhanced" Grand Prixs. In return for having the tournament "enhanced" this way, the Office was going to award "Petit Prix" points to the players in such events. I think you could get points not only by winning the tournament, but also by just finishing the event (without a forfeit loss) with an even score? The Office was going to keep track of the results, and at the end of the year I think there were supposed to be some kind of modest awards for those who racked up the most "Petit Prix" points, similar to the Grand Prix.
The idea was to encourage people to participate in tournaments (and [i]not[/i] to forfeit out of them!), even if they didn't have a high expectation of winning. It was also seen as a way to encourage juniors to participate in open tournaments, as there were supposed to be special "Petit Prix" awards for the top-finishing juniors. And of course, it was hoped that this would also encourage organizers to contribute to the Health and Benefits Fund, too!
In the mid-to-late '90's I had most of my non-Grand Prix tournaments also contribute to the Health and Benefits Fund by awarding Petit Prix Points, but no tabulations were ever made, no "winners" were ever announced, and no prizes were ever awarded. When several players all started asking me, "What do those funny symbols in your TLAs mean?" (the special "Petit Prix" symbol), I figured it was time to stop with the fifty cents per player.