I have only been involved in chess for about a year and a half, and it is solely related to my daughter playing chess. I have been a supporter on various fronts to local chess organizers and I am hoping to be in a position where I can take that to the next level very soon. That being said what I just witnessed has me rethinking my support of chess at all.
My daughter missed the World Youth qualification by roughly 27 points and did qualify by the US Chess federations rules for the team just one month after the deadline. I asked for a special request because she really wanted to go to Greece and she has been improving very quickly (in my mind at least) and I felt that she would definitely at least be competitive with the rest of the team in her category. Here was the USCF’s response:
I took their response at face value and thought to myself okay, they are sticking to their guns and we’ll qualify next year. I told my daughter the outcome and she was disappointed but we agreed to work harder and ensure that we made it with no caveats next year.
Lo and behold I look at the uschess site today and I see that there were a minimum of 8 exceptions allowed and it was allowed because of their “special appeal”.
My daughter missed the cutoff by one month and less than 30 rating points. Other people were allowed who were more than 120 points behind the required rating qualifications. I find it ridiculously unfair that I’m told that no one has ever been given a special exception (which is apparently not true because on the forums they gave at least one example of previous exceptions), and that no one ever would be.
My summary is that my daughter was blown off entirely and frankly leads me to question putting another dollar into the us chess system. It’s infuriating to be told one thing and than have a completely opposite result happen.
Just thought I’d share my wondrous experience with trying to get my daughter to play on the high level us chess team.
I had no involvement with the selection process, but as I recall the World Youth has quite a few different divisions. It may be possible that they made exceptions in order to fill out other divisions.
The comments to the CLO article World Youth Delegation Set express similar questions. No one mentions when the organizer’s deadline (for exceptions, rosters, etc) is or was, but it might be worth a shot to make a request based on the exception clause if Mr. Provine is ready to pony up flight$ etc.
Don’t think of it as supporting chess – in the end it’s a question of what does your child like and enjoy, and setbacks will happen in any pursuit. It’s poor consolation, but this type of situation comes up every year where a player just barely makes the cut. Although I’m in favor of a hard cut off and no exceptions, I’m not on the scholastic committee (don’t want to be) and certainly don’t know the personal situations of any of the players. Call it glass half full: this small set back will make next year’s World Youth that much sweet.
I had already told them that I understood we would make our own travel arrangements and that it didn’t matter to me if she got their “USCF Official Coaching” or not. She is a great chess player for her age group and she barely missed the cutoff. She also made the cutoff just one month later.
I agreed with the hard and fast cutoff and I didn’t complain at all. I simply said OK to them and went on about my business.
It now seems as though me going away so easily was not the right choice for my daughter.
As to traveling, I just combine it with my business and she loves going to national events. She has gone to the World Open in Philadelphia, the North American Youth Championship in Canada, the Nationals, in Texas, etc. And I would have taken her to the Pan Am in Brazil (since it’s open and not invitational) had it not overlapped with the Susan Polgar Invitational in Texas which she chose to go to instead (and had the best time of her entire chess career).
I’m not complaining that she didn’t make it by their hard and fast rules. I am complaining that they told me no and told others yes. Had they stuck to their guns and actually did what they told me they were going to do I would never have posted here nor contemplated some of the actions I am thinking of.
I also contacted FIDE directly (as that is what my daughter’s chess instructor told me to do). I asked if she could play without being part of the U.S. Chess Federation. They said no. They also said that there was no restriction to the number of “additional players” that the Federation could add and I should just go back to them and see if they will make an excpetion.
Is there such a massive number of parents out there that are willing to take two weeks off from work, pay for two weeks of hotel, airfare to Greece, all food and activities related expenses, etc. to go to a chess tournament? I can’t imagine that the line is infinitely long for the number of committed parents that are willing to do that.
In my opinion the U.S. Chess Federation should do everything they can to actually encourage parents like myself, who spend a small fortune on chess and chess related activities (lessons, books, DVD’s, travel, sponsorships of clubs, etc.). But no, what I get is these are the rules and good luck next year, only to find out later that their position is simply not true and actually changes on a whim.
This is not the way you get dedicated parents and players to support your organization, not to mention the fact that the number of active female chess players is so atrociously low.
I just want everyone to understand the full story behind my complaint, and reasoning for it.
Reno - I’m sorry to see this result for you and your daughter. I’m disappointed also because Mike N. is also a USCF EB member and should have been looking at the bigger picture of having another great player under the US flag who was not being a financial responsibility of the USCF. I’m not privy to the conversations, but it seems from an outsider looking in that a double standard was applied.
It’s one of my beliefs that the scholastic community, regardless of the players’ strength, should be made aware of international events, whether be the World Youth or the World School Team, etc and leave it to the parents decision if they will handle the financial costs of sending themselves and their child to the event. The federation shouldn’t be looking at it from the standpoint of ‘competitive or not’ but instead educating the community on opportunities.
It’s nice to win and bring home medals but the experience, especially for kids, is priceless.
I am sorry as well. There absolutely was a double standard applied and now Mike’s stance is that he simply “forgot” my daughters request when the Scholastic Council chose to reverse their decision and allow exemptions. Let’s sum it up:
They denied my daughter’s request saying that they had never made exceptions before and will never make exceptions for her.
They change their mind and allow at least 8 boys attend who weren’t qualified.
I bring this to their attention and they tell me that they “forgot” my daughters request.
I am beyond angry at this point and will be taking actions to ensure that they don’t “forget” anyone else’s innocent daughters going forward.
I am absolutely amazed that someone could be an Executive Board member and take this stance.
I’ll keep you in the loop as to to how my actions end up going with my staff attorney. I don’t take people messing with my daughters right to equal and fair treatment very well. I would have never thought that I’d have to resort to this simply to get my daughter to not be completely forgotten/ignored/treated like a second class citizen.
Also, it wasn’t just Mike. There were three other U.S. Chess members on these emails and the most recent one to me included Bill Hall. Seems as though out of three people especially with an “Executive Board Member” involved that it wouldn’t have come to this.
To me this seems like it could be a great opportunity for the USCF to do a couple of things. The first being to take the attitude of what can we do to make this right? And at the same time show another value of the Forums themselves in that they allow things like this to be corrected in some fashion.
I agree with your first statement, but disagree with the second. I don’t know that someone’s forum complaint getting resolved shows that the forums have value. The complaint was probably resolved by contacting the right person or the threat of legal action.
I haven’t given any details mainly because this evening I received an email from another “chair” of some sort that had some comments that lead me to believe that this may not be resolved based on references in their email.
I do still think that everything is resolved but this person apparently believes or more specifically
that me taking the serious stance that I have will somehow make the US Chess delegation fare poorly were my daughter to attend the World Youth. How’s that for an outstanding and positive endorsement of adding a 10 year old girl to the team? Just another shining example of well communicated intentions.
I would like to also state that Bill Hall and Aviv did resolve this in a very friendly fashion and I truly feel that both of them cared.
These other “chairs and board members” not so much.
I have asked them tonight if they want to continue down this route and I will post more when I get a response. Hopefully my post will simply be all is resolved and I can fade back into the woodwork and just worry about helping my daughter get better at chess:-), but who knows maybe they want to continue down a path that may end up interesting.
I don’t want to post any details yet because I will give them the opportunity to confer among themselves and see how they want to continue.
When I was your daughter’s age, my rating was 897. So she might peak at 2750?
USCF has a legitimate interest in making sure that all who play are competitive. A “hard cutoff” would accomplish this. I would prefer a certain amount of slack built into the system to accommodate these borderline cases, but such a process would need to be equitable and as transparent as possible.
So what was the result? It doesn’t look like the simplest solution was chosen, which would have been to put your daughter on the team.
From the way it’s been presented here, you and your daughter were treated incredibly unfairly. The fact that your daughter was still not allowed on the team is even worse. I can’t believe one more person would make the team too big to be coached.
