I’m confused. What does taking the extra step of attempting to verify clubs that are not schools mean?
I’m quite sure that there were many clubs that were not schools playing and getting trophies.
Probably everyone can ignore this and let it go. We all know all-star clubs are allowed at the NYA, right? That was what I assumed when I saw the TD announcement say “CLUB TEAMS ALLOWED!” in elated text.
However, this brings up another angle. Many of the “all-stars” don’t care to play with the below 1000 crowd for a number of reasons I leave as another topic, unless it’s for National recognition (read Scholarship possibilities/glory).
My point being, so what if all-star teams are formed. The all-stars have moved on! Get rid of the bad rule regarding teams having to be formed only from the same school. Guess what, most schools don’t care about chess! In fact, it’s a big surprise to many schools that there are kids from their school that play chess. This rule actually hurts Chess, because there are not enough kids that play chess, so many kids that WANT to play on a team CANNOT because they are separated from their peers by this rule. I run a Chess club, and I see this all the time, kids are disappointed they cannot play on a team with their friends because they don’t go to the same school.
It’s a stupid rule.
For our local kids, this is one of the best things about the tournament. We (Bloomington Normal Area Scholastic Chess) have usually 7 or 8 local tournaments a year between the School Clubs in the area. As it is, the same kids end up on top boards every week. In addition to school clubs, we have another city wide club that meets called the Twin City Chess Club. This club started as an adult club, but many of our better youth players have taken this as a challenging opportunity. They really like the NYA because they don’t have to play the same kids that they play every week at home. Instead they get to be teamates of the kids they compete against in the school team tournaments. I know my son used to love this tournament - even more than Nationals or SuperNationals in the spring.
The guy who coaches the kids in their club play is someone many of you may know - Garret Scott (former Policy Board member and Scholastic Council member)
FTI, to change that rule your best bet would be to come up with a proposed change and not only submit it as an ADM (advanced delegate motion) for consideration at the next delegates meeting, but also pass it along to the Scholastic Committee for their consideration and comments.
I think they are trying to make sure that it is really a club and not just a scholl team trying to make themselves eligible for a different prize.
We have had to deal with trying to allow club teams at our state scholastic championship without allowing all-star teams. If the all-stars are legitimate members of a club, then that is not a problem, but how do you define a club as distinguished from a set of players from a wide region of the state who are just recruited by a coach for that one event? Where the players on the “club” team may not even have met each other before the event. We are currently using the rule: “Clubs - clubs must meet for at least 8 months per year and be a USCF affiliate, limited to 10 players in a section, players must have attended 6 regularly scheduled meetings of the club in the previous 3 months. (A club officer should be able to provide verification that players are eligible to compete for their club.)”
In general, we’ve found that when you allow club teams, it is the teams from legitimate clubs that are the ones complaining about the all-star teams from “clubs” which they don’t consider legitimate. And while everyone probably “knows a club when they see it”, trying to draw up specific rules hasn’t been easy.
Tnesham, I am not sure I understand the issue with this. Perhaps I could have explained it better.
Nobody is stopping club teams from forming, we just want to make sure it is an actual club as per the scholastic guidelines. Why do you say that club teams can’t be formed? It could be a community club, a library or park district club, a private club, a school club, but it does have to be a club that meets. It does allow friends that go to other schools play together if they attend a club together.
The real problem is the rampant recruiting that goes on. Little Jimmy is a 1600, he can score lots of points, lets ask him to be on our team! Who cares if we don’t even know the kid or have a club in common with him?
Well the teams that are actual schools or clubs that are following the rules do care. If we just allow it to be a free-for-all, those teams could get cheated.
What does taking the extra step to verify mean. For club teams we required an extra form to be filled out documenting when and where the club meets and details of it. Not a perfect system I grant you, but better than nothing at all.
How does this rule hurt chess? Please explain.
BTW, the event had 497 players which was the largest NYA since 2004. This was in spite of horrific problems with the hotel, H1N1 scares, and a down economy. The rounds started on time, and a good time was had by most.
Or what about the team from NY that had a CT player on it? That must be a heck of a commute in order for players to have attended 6 regularly scheduled meetings of the club in the previous 3 months.
Face it, the rule is likely not “verified” all that closely (at all??) and I suspect that when the rule is applied it is done so by the team that feels threatened so as to improve their chances.
I think a modified rule like that is ok: players must be from the same geographical region where no player is more than 50 miles from any other player, and belong to the same club, regardless of school affiliation.
As I said, schools don’t care about chess, so who really cares?? Hmm, must be the guy who runs the club and wants to improve his odds. The private schools are like all-star teams since they don’t have the same geographical restrictions imposed on them as do public schools.
Let’s look at current results. What happened to the school clubs as opposed to the non-school clubs. Of course the school-clubs were out-classed. Is that a bad thing? No!
Change to my modified rule and the number of players/teams will increase. Why? I know children that don’t attend a school with a chess club, so they go to a different school’s chess club. But when a tournament comes they cannot play for their team because of the school rule.
It’s time to change it.
I posted before I saw this. I have no problem with the modified NYA format but with the same-school rule that gets applied to most scholastic tournaments. I addressed this in my previous post.
Flash - families move. A USCF membership state listing may not reflect the current residence of the player. Also some kids go away to school - like the math science academies in many states. So they may be living at the school which is more than 50 miles from the residence.
Suppose you were an unpaid volunteer charged with monitoring this. What exceptions/explanations would you accept?
Suppose you have one kid who lives 26 miles east of the school/club and another who lives 26 miles west of it. (The chess club in Freeport IL comes to mind here.)
FWIW, I know several kids who live in Lincoln Nebraska but attend a private school in Omaha, over 50 miles away. That school has also had a chess club that placed well at Nationals.
Yes, their parents drive them back and forth EVERY DAY.
Certainly, by possibly 1-2%. Meanwhile you will have managed to tick off 50-80% of the other teams. These tournaments have a specific design, for a specific type of experience. Would you allow men to play in a women’s tournament? Would you allow adults to play in scholastic tournaments? I fail to understand why people criticize events geared toward a specifically defined group. Such events don’t prevent anyone from playing chess. There are plenty of other events around.
Some schools might not care about chess, but the kids on the school team care and they see themselves as a team. So do their parents.
It’s also not uniformly true that “schools don’t care about chess,” or that schools don’t have a critical mass of good players. My kid has gone to schools that traditionally have large, deep and occasionally strong chess teams. The kids all live within a two-mile radius of the schools, and they’re public schools. Sometimes it works out.
You do what works to get a club going. If you can get a viable club going in your school, great. If you need to find a bunch of kids from multiple schools and make a club that way, that’s fine, too. The fact that USCF holds two different kinds of competitions to accommodate each type of team is also fine.
I think the current system is just as unmanageable. It is an antiquated and unnecessarily restrictive rule. Better to have no rule and just let the kids play on whatever team they want.
I suspect most of the Scholastic chess community would disagree with you. The current rules are the result of many years of refinements, most of them to try to make the system as fair as possible, many of them to prevent abusive situations.
But if you can come up with a better set of rules, I suggest you send them to the Scholastic Council and show up at the spring nationals to promote/defend them.
The main reason the same-school rule is bad is because many school systems have schools very close to each other when population densities are high. The number of players is quite small so we often see one or two players isolated to one school when a few miles away there is a team they could play on. So I am trying to find a solution to that problem. If no rule is worse than the current rule, I have no problem conceding that point based on the historical experiences. But the current rule as-is stifles Chess growth by killing the involvement of many in teams only a few miles away, simply because they don’t go to that school.
Now I don’t know about other states, but trying to get schools interested in Chess in Missouri is very frustrating. When I approach an administrator of the school, they tell me I must get a sponsor, which is a school employee to run the club, plus get board approval/financing. Ok, I don’t know this process very well so I get shutdown. Nonetheless, these kids come to my club.
I recall some years ago one parent criticizing me for not forming a team from my club to play in the local tournaments. I had a difficult time explaining the rules, but they understood our club could not have a team to represent the club. Those kids could still be players today if they could have formed a team. They were certainly far from all-stars.
It seems that the rule could be loosened up a bit to cover these situations.
You say that like it’s something simple. In a just world, it would be. The trouble is, when you have crazy bureaucratic requirements for after-school activities, funding shortages or uninvolved parents, you tend to have all three at once.
I tried to get a chess club going at one of the schools where I substitute teach. I would have had to prepare a report in which I specified not only when and where and for how long the club would meet but also what specific state academic standards it would address. (It would not have been necessary for me to draw up a budget because no money whatsoever is available for any extracurricular purpose. It was unclear whether, as a non-full-time employee of the school district, I was even permitted to sponsor a club.) Then I would have had to submit this report to an extracurricular activities committee, which would examine, among other things, how students who attended the club would get home from school afterward. Because of the transportation requirement, students would have to enroll in the club, not just attend when they felt like it. It also would not have been possible for club members to travel anywhere else to take place in tournaments or matches, because any district-organized trip has to go by school bus, and there’s no money for buses. I gave up. It’s such a gigantic hassle, the school only has seven extracurricular activities: four are sports, two are essentially counseling activities for at-risk kids, and the seventh – Science Club – is newly added this year, having been bulled through by a special ed teacher with waaay more tolerance for bureaucracy than I have.
And it is only a short step from there to “'I’d rather play for XYZ than ABC, because they’ve got a better team/coach.” And that’s the point at which things start to get very abusive.