Greetings!
About a month ago I started helping the chess club at the school where my two eldest children attend classes. Some of the children are really interested in chess, and some are more casual about it. However, I would like the kids to continue to play throughout the summer. I have been thinking about setting up a chess club outside of school so that the interested parties can meet and play over the summer.
I’m thinking that it would be good to have around 10 minutes of instruction before the kids choose who they are going to play with. A few of the kids asked me questions about castling and promotion, which I think would benefit the club as a whole.
How does one go about organizing a club? Is there some sort of kit that the USCF has to help people with new clubs? That would probably be helpful. Ideally I’d like more parental involvement, since the faculty advisor for the club is not often there. I’m doing the best I can with my available resources and (limited) knowledge of chess.
Any suggestions and links to available resources are appreciated.
One more thing…
I’d like to set up an end of year tournament for the kids, but I don’t know how to go about doing that. Any ideas?
It’s all a function of how formal you want to be. A club can be nothing more than a group of people who get together to play, or it can be an organized endeavor, with regular instruction and open tournaments sanctioned and rated by the USCF.
The Illinois Chess Association has an abundance of resources on its website for people interested in organizing youth chess; see here.
In my opinion, based on the information you’ve shared, you should have at least the following:
More than this can probably wait until you have a good sense of how serious your kids are.
Well, if you’re limiting it to the kids, and they’re just coming to grips with castling and promotion, you probably want to start with an unrated, informal tournament. How to set up your tournament will depend on how many players you have.
If you have 10 or fewer, you probably want to set up a round robin tournament where each kid plays each other kid once. You can find the tables telling you how to set up pairings for a round robin in FIDE’s Laws of Chess, at http://www.fide.com/component/handbook/?id=20&view=category. Of course, a round robin will have as many rounds as the number of players plus one, so if you have too many kids, it’ll take too long, and you can either split the kids into groups and have each group do a round robin, or do a Swiss System.
The other way of doing a tournament is a Swiss System, and because it’s an unrated tournament, it doesn’t require all the complicated pairing rules that can make hand pairing difficult. In each round, start with the highest score group, pair the kids in that score group against each other in such a way as to try to alternate colors when possible and avoid having the same players play each other twice; if there’s an odd number of players in a score group, move one down to the next group lower.
For more thorough explanation of Swiss System pairing rules, see the USCF Rules of Chess. Once the kids are capable of playing games with minimal rules problems, then consider taking them to USCF rated scholastic tournaments.
I’d recommend finding a scholastic chess tournament near you and volunteer to help for the day. You’ll get a chance to see what type of things need to happen, and you should be able to get a quick run down on how tournaments are paired. You won’t be allowed to be acting as a director, but every event needs extra people at the scorer’s table, etc.
As an alternate, since you are just getting started out, instead of running an end of year tournament, you might want to just set up a ladder. Estimate the kids playing ability, number them 1 to however many kids there are (flip a coin or something to initially assign their ranking if there are a lot of people close to avoid hurting anyone’s feelings), and then let the kids have the chance to play the people above them to move up.
Robgetty: Thanks for your insights!
The next local scholastic chess tournament is in the fall, and I’m planning on attending. I wouldn’t want to be a tournament director at this point, since I am really only a beginner myself. I think that it is important to have participated in a tournament before directing one!
However, I will be playing my first ever tournament in a couple of weeks. Next year I think I will be in a much stronger position to help those kids. I’ve passed on the great information that the other commenters in this thread have shared to Mr. Bush (the academic advisor for the school chess club), and I will be sure to share your insights with him as well.
I’ve got about 10 kids and their families that will be getting together with me at a local recreation center where we will be meeting on a weekly basis. I’ve got a friend who is a master level player, and I’m recruiting him to help me with the club.