February has few events for Middle School this year – but there ARE events! Here are two you should consider….
- The Northwest Grade Level at Bryant Elementary (Seattle) on 2/6 has a special 7-8 section. Let’s bring a BUNCH of us and show everyone that we have a strong community that supports Middle School!
- The Mountlake Terrace BUGHOUSE in Lynnwood on 2/13 is a fun event for all, with a K-12 section for older kids. No need to have a partner, we will match you up with someone at registration.
Both events can be found at www.chess4life.com
We’ve been talking to Elliot Neff from Chess4Life about what can be done to support Middle School Chess in the Seattle Area. He has agreed to host events with a 7-12 OPEN with CASH AWARDS. To make it more appealing to players, he agreed to make 50% of the total entry fee turned into prize money.
What does that mean? Simple. The more kids that play, the bigger the cash prizes will be. We thank Chess4Life for offering to make this possible. In addition, the Mountlake Terrace Chess Club has offered to donate $100 to one tournament each month for the 1st place award. That means one event a month is GUARANTEED to have a $100 first place award.
If anyone is interested in the Seattle area, check out the
- Heritage Event (signup at www.chess4life.com) on 1/9 (cash awards)
- Meridian Park event (signup at www.chessplayer.com) on 1/16 (trophies).
If we can get a bunch of kids to show up there, we should be well on our way to rebuilding Middle School Chess in Seattle once again!
In Middle School, its not as obvious to find an event that you can play in. Here are a couple suggestions. Please note that we are not “recommending” any of these, we are just getting the word out to anyone interested in continuing to compete.
In the Seattle Area – Chessmates Fall Kickoff on 11/14 is a large event that has a section for 5-8th grade. This usually fills up pretty fast so you want to play. This is an event for all levels of skill. You can sign up here.
Also in the Seattle Area, the Washington Class on Thanksgiving weekend (11/27) has a 7-12 OPEN section. You can sign up here.
In the Tri-Cities area, the Queens Quest with Knights on the Side will let you join the fun as well on 11/14. Contact David Sommers (dsommers@libertychristian.net) for more information.
Based on feedback from a number of parents, we moved the MS Individual Championships to the same location and venue as the Elementary School Championships. As word starts to filter out, we have received some concerns that we are “competing” with the Elementary Championships. We assure you that this is not so.
The reason for moving the event in this manner was to allow the greatest number of players to participate in Middle School Events. Last year, there were only 30 kids that supported the event. By moving it to our current location, we expect more kids to be able to participate, making it a better event for everyone.
We also recommend that if your child qualifies for the State Elementary event, you support that one. You are certainly welcome to attend the MS Event if your child is in Grades 5-9 but we want to stress that we believe we take a second seat to the Elementary event. We are working very closely with this year’s Elementary Organizer and we are working hard to make sure that the entire community is served with high quality chess.
Some folks have asked “Why do you include 5th Grade?”. “There is no clear definition for “Middle” or “Junior High” school in Washington State. We started our search with the source of the NW Rating System. From there, we checked a large number of school web sites to see what grades they supported. We found several that serviced 5th – 8th grade and called themselves “Middle School”. There was also 1 that included 9th grade. We chose to be as inclusive as possible and allow Grade 5, 6 and 9 in based on that rational. We could have been more exclusionary and created a complicated set of rules to exclude a number of kids from playing but we decided that the purpose was to get more kids to play, not less. We hope that clears things up.
One last note – The Middle School events are all non-profit events. Our objective is to make sure that any surplus is put back into the community. Like WHSCA, no one is here to make money off the event – just assure that kids can have a great time.
If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to post them here. If you have a question, chances are that someone else is thinking it, too……
As I talk with parents, a common issue I hear is “I’d love my child to play on a team but we don’t have enough kids in the school!”. This is evident by the number of kids that play in the MS Team Championships vs the “Mini-Teams”.
We are proposing that the primary mission of the Middle School Chess Association is to grow the number of kids that play in Middle School – first and foremost. We believe that with greater participation numbers, we can build a stronger program.
To achieve that goal, we are making some changes to the rules that allow teams of SCHOOL DISTRICTS to be formed if there are not enough kids in a single school to form a team. By banding together more kids, we hope to make Team Chess more accessible to Middle School kids in the State.
This is a break from the past and we are also putting in place safeguards to prevent the creation of “Super-Teams”. We are planning to empower a committee with the discretion of investigating and making determinations on accusations of creating “Super-Teams” so that all will have a fair advantage. We hope to appeal to “common sense” solutions as opposed to overly legalistic approaches.
This board is the forum for this discussion. Please place your thoughts and opinions here so that we can involve everyone in the process of coming to the best possible solution.
This web site middleschoolchess.com offers you several options for reading our content.
- Visit our site using a bookmark, and you’ll see recent news at the top.
- Add yourself to our newsletter distribution list (as soon as we finish writing the signup system) and the articles will show up in your e-mail in-box.
- Subscribe to our RSS feed, and your feed reader will highlight new articles as they’re published. There are free RSS readers but you may find that your e-mail system (including MS Outlook) already has a very good one built-in!
We hope these articles will be much more interactive than most web sites, and invite you to comment on them. This gives more students and parents a chance to share questions and information about middle school chess. We’d like to build a chess community that supports each other through grades 5-9.
I hope you find one or more of these methods very convenient for you. Please participate!
We are currently accepting comments on the honor system; there is no log-in or authentication involved. If this becomes a problem then we may require registration to make comments, but let’s keep it easy and simple for now.
Note that most comments will be public immediately, but comments containing HTML links will be reviewed by the moderator to remove spam and then approved shortly thereafter.
When my own son graduated from the 6th grade, I thought to myself, “Well – that’s it. Chess is over”. I looked back with a combined sense of relieve and sorrow, recalling watching my boy grow from a small Kindergartner just learning to play – to placing in the top 25 in Washington State in his final year. Those memories fill me with enormous pride.
Introduction
As I looked around the “Middle School” opportunities, I realized that I knew very little about Middle School chess. I found that some parents knew quite a bit about it and others just thought chess “died” after grade 6.
A small group of committed parents would like to change that — and we need your help.
Middle School Chess has traditionally been a “bridge” from the Elementary System where most of the opportunities are focused on individual competition to the High School System where most of the play is based on a true Team playing head to head against another school team. Unfortunately, as kids enter their teen years, the things that are important to the change drastically and those events they do participate in demand much more time (if your child is like mine, video games seem far more important!). It becomes very hard to prioritize. This, along with other factors, has caused a significant drop in participation. With fewer kids playing, fewer kids want to play (who wants to always have unbalanced games or worse, playing the same kids over and over again!).
I’ve been asked to take over the Washington State Individual and Team Championships – something I’m proud to do. At the same time, there are very few players across the state continuing in scholastic chess when compared to elementary grade levels. There are a number of things we plan to do to change that. Our focus will be to continue to provide opportunities for kids to participate in high level, serious play that is appropriate for their age. In addition, we want to make Chess more accessible to more kids by creating ways that they can participate in Team Events (even if there are not enough kids in their school to form a team), more individual events and improve communication with the most important person – you, the parent. Without your support, Middle School Chess will dwindle. In the coming months, we will be sending out a series of communications informing you of opportunities to allow your child to remain active if he or she chooses.
Web Site
Part of our activity is establishing a Middle School Chess Web Site that will be a single source for all the activities and opportuniti4es in the State that we can find and are told about. The site is www.middleschoolchess.com. Please join us, subscribe to our newsletter and keep coming back to our site. We need your participation and thoughts to make Middle School Chess grow and thrive!
Hello, and a big welcome from your webmaster! Last February in 2009 we moved the WHSCA web site to a new web server, and I’ve been implementing improvements ever since.
Now we’ve added www.middleschoolchess.com to bring you news about scholastic chess in grades 5-9. Stay tuned!
Chess | rickjorgensen | 
January 25, 2010 12:08 pm | 
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