How To Motivate ChessKids

I never considered myself a coach and even get uncomfortable when people call me "coach Tina." Why? My USCF rating is barely 750!  

So how could I start a community chess club and take the kids to the next level? While I may not be the best chess player in the room, I am good at planning and executing, and I know how to motivate kids!  

You don't need to be a great chess player to run a great chess program, and here's how we do it.

I started Hampton Roads Scholastic Chess Club in February 2014 simply to allow about 20 rated kids to have more opportunity for tournament play on weeknights. The next summer, we hosted a chess day in the park and opened it to the community. We had an incredible turnout, and with it a high demand to expand our club to include training for new kids. We started the training program in September 2014.  

Coach Joan Schlich working with Rockfish Harrison Wingett.

One of the keys was setting up an ability group system and bringing on a good team of volunteer coaches. Each ability group has a "report card" that covers the appropriate level in the ChessKid curriculum. When a child masters all of the skills on that checklist, he or she is "promoted" to the next group.  

Being a club in a beach town, we chose to name our groups accordingly: Minnows, Rockfish, Dolphins, Sharks, and Orcas. The kids work like crazy to get promoted and take pride in wearing that sticker on their name tags.  

 

Coach Ernie Schlich working with Minnow Leo Wylie.

But that wasn't enough. The kids needed to practice between our Tuesday night meetings in order to improve.

I'd always used the ChessKid curriculum in my clubs, but I'd never fully integrated the website into our training program. I began to notice that the kids who were using the site regularly were improving by leaps and bounds.  

How could I get ALL of the kids to use it that much? We had been using certificates and colorful keychains to reward the kids for ratings improvements at tournaments, but how could we get them to improve in the first place?

Then it hit me: set up a rewards system specifically for using ChessKid!  

So we came up with a system of rewards ranging from top online ratings in Fast and Slow Chess and Puzzles, and also the "workhorse" who did the most work on ChessKid overall.  The kids were in it to win it and worked all season to capture one of the top five spots for trophies in each category (many more got certificates and keychains).

Leo checking out his ChessKid Honorable Mention certificate.

 

After the awards ceremony, the handful of kids who had been holding out and not using the website immediately began using ChessKid on a regular basis because they wanted in on those awards!

 

Alison Wu smiling ear to ear as she receives her fifth place trophy for the ChessKid Workhorse competition, for completing more than 1,400 activities on ChessKid.com!

Ethan Wu took first place in the ChessKid Workhorse competition with more than 4,000 activities!

Just as I had initially noticed when a few kids were voluntarily using ChessKid on their own, we saw a strong correlation between frequent use of ChessKid and success over the board. The kids who were solving thousands of puzzles and playing hundreds of online games or watching 100 videos were the kids who were winning trophies at all of the local and regional tournaments.  

A group of three of my ChessKids even won a team trophy -- 10th place -- at the state championship, the first such honor for our region in probably a decade.

ChessKids Luke Haselbush, Lane Downing, and Justin Havens (not pictured) take 10th place in the K-3 section, Virginia State Championship 2015, for another one of our ChessKid clubs, Grace Academy Homeschool Cooperative.

Over the course of the season, our club tripled in size as word spread about the fun and success our kids were having, and the kids collectively gained almost 4,000 rating points!  

We are now in the midst of our summer ChessKid challenge.  Every day I log on and see many of the more than 100 kids I manage in our club batch online, working hard to earn medals and trophies -- sort of our equivalent of a summer reading challenge.  

We look forward to continuing to grow our club and our talent in the 2015-2016 season, and ChessKid will remain at the center of it all!

Logan Schaefer, Puzzle Master Champion with a rating of over 1750 on ChessKid puzzles and third place Workhorse with more than 2,300 activities!