At its February meeting, the Executive Board approved bringing back the Clubs Committee after an absence of a few years with Bob Rasmussen, President of the Fresno Chess Club, as chair. This committee rarely had an active chair through the years or accomplished much, but Bob is very enthusiastic and led the rebuilding of the Fresno club from 15 members to several hundred during the past few years, so I am optimistic. Anyone interested in discussing how to build a chess club or joining the committee is welcome to call Bob at 559-708-8100.
USCF is appointing a Clubs Committee with Bob Rasmussen, President of the Fresno Chess Club, as chair. This committee rarely had an active chair through the years or accomplished much, but Bob is very enthusiastic and led the rebuilding of the Fresno club from 15 members to several hundred during the past few years, so I am optimistic. Anyone interested in discussing how to build a chess club or joining the committee is welcome to call Bob at 559-708-8100.
This is a positive development. I am much more active in chess because there is a good club that meets weekly. I am not sure how a committee can help clubs to start in more places, but if they can then it is good for the chess community. Clubs with rated games give chess players a great reason to join the USCF, and having lots of active clubs will do more for the long-term health of the USCF than asking existing members for donations (as discussed in recent board meetings).
Unfortunately, he doesn’t have one. I am hoping this will change soon. He says he can be reached c/o the Fresno Chess Club (fresnochessclub.org), but all my contacts with him, except for meeting him in Fresno, have been by phone.
Well I sure do need the help so I want to follow this.
I have some suggestions though for the Committee
A. A newsletter for non-committee members. Probably email based. I know that is not exactly original but he might want to limit his group. But there still might be informative for more passive but interested parties.
B. Also because of the Committee assignment; you probably need a wide range of clubs or would be club.
hey, there is a lively discussion on another part of this forum where some seem to be defending a potential EB candidate’s right to be a convicted felon, and you want to bounce this guy for not having an email address!
As long as they’ve served their time, and have an email address, I don’t have a problem with an ex-con getting elected to the board - as long as everyone voting for/against that person was aware of their history before the vote. But not having an email address would seem to be a major hindrance to actually doing the job.
The school-aged players at our club likely all play on the internet. The club offers something that the internet doesn’t, as otherwise they would not take the effort to show up and pummel me. Good luck to the committee on defining that difference and teaching local organizers to be successful.
Joel Johnson has done a phenomenal job with his valley chess clubs in the Phoenix area. Free, USCF rated chess on multiple days of the week is hard to beat. Hopefully at some point there will be enough interest to get the monthly G/60 tournament going again. Borders have been great with allowing the clubs to be run in their stores as well.
I know I said I was going to wait till I had an e-mail address. But one thing that my club has been trying to establish lately is something that we call Travel Matches where we play other clubs for bragging rights and the ablity to just meet other players.
When we started we played against a club in VA (we are in NC). But we were close enough that it was only a few hours drive. We played two games of G/90 against one player of the other club and in the end we figured out who won. This idea has been picking up recently and we have scheduled our third and fourth matches (one against another club in NC and the other against a club ins SC) with a fifth match pending.
I think that this commettee could really take a lead in getting clubs like mine together with other clubs for something like this. It helps to build the publicity of the club by giving us a chance to player new people and let them know of our tournaments that they can participate in. The overall cost is pretty low for these events. Rating fees, one club that we traveled to provided us lunch and gas. Since we are playing for pride and friendship we don’t require any entry fees or pay out prizes but we still have managed to get atleast 10 players from each club at these events.
(I like to give credit where credit is due though, I’m not the person who arranges these at my club. It is hard to get some club managers to work on these things and without Mike doing the work for our club, I’m sure that these Travel Matches would never get off the ground.)
So, maybe this commettee could get to a point where it helps arrange matches like these. I think they build the charactor of the club as well as gets active players together for new compeitition and since you can typically drive a two hours, play two games and get home you can do it on a Saturday and not have to eat up a whole weekend.