The Road To A National Championship

Are you the team from Alabama?

I kept hearing this question during the weekend of elementary nationals, and I realized others were noticing what I was noticing as the tournament progressed. Our Madison, Alabama kids were having a very strong performance on a national stage.

After two rounds on Friday, Rainbow Elementary had moved to third place in the K6-U1000 section with seven points.  After five rounds, Saturday evening, Rainbow moved into first place and never relinquished that spot.

On Sunday, the competition tightened, but Rainbow held on to win the first national elementary chess championship in state history in the K6-U1000 section. 

 

Board of Education Recognition -- Front row L to R:  Maanasi Limaye, Mercedes Zich, Constance Wang, Geon Park.
Back row L to R:  Principal Dorinda White, Coach Bill Nash, Superintendent Dr. Dee Fowler, and school board member and Rainbow coach Ranae Bartlett.

There were other success stories on our team that weekend. We had two kids who just started our program this year who competed in the K5-U900 section and ended up with six points each, leading their team to 15th place.  These kids were leaders in every puzzle contest I held all year long using ChessKid, and it really paid off at nationals. 

 

Sam (left) and Victor (right) before the last round when they won their sixth point!

This was also our school’s first year to be able to field a team in the K6 championship section, and that team finished in eighth place! Looking at each individual kid’s rating in that section, one would not have expected that finish, but they over-performed and really played like a team to end strong.

The road to a national championship starts now. At this time last year, Rainbow’s Coach Bill Nash and I sat down and mapped out what we needed to do to get ready for nationals in 2015. Our team could not travel to Dallas for elementary nationals in 2014 because like many public school teams, we receive no school funding to support our program. 

Our program is run entirely by volunteer parents and coaches. What we lack in financial support, we make up for in hard work and dedication by our kids and parents. We knew nationals was moving back to Nashville the following year (within driving distance), and we wanted to be prepared. For the past three years, Bill and I would look at our team and decide what we need to add next to the program. It does not happen overnight.

Online Learning

In May of 2014, the Rainbow Chess Club purchased its first club account with ChessKid.com. By purchasing a club account, each parent ended up paying much less per student than they would have if they signed up individually. We knew we needed to introduce some type of online learning to our chess program. Online learning is a tremendous equalizer, not only in education but also in chess.  Online learning enables students to move at their own pace and to absorb as much as they have the desire to absorb. We have no grandmasters in the state of Alabama, but we do have an internet connection.

So, I enlisted the help of my then-sixth-grade son to review multiple online learning platforms. I was reviewing them all too, but from a coach’s perspective of managing the progress of the team and guiding their usage and development. At the end of the day, I selected ChessKid.com for our elementary chess program.

Summer

In June and July of 2014, our team held its first monthly puzzle contest. We challenged our kids to solve as many puzzles correctly as possible.  We declared winners in June and winners in July, and delivered prizes. I look back and realize the summer was a great time to introduce kids to this program because they had the time to really dive in and explore what it had to offer, not only in puzzles but also videos, lessons, and computer exercises.

Educators will speak about the “summer slide.” Over the summer, when students and teachers get some much-deserved rest, math and reading skills can wane if they are not developed or maintained. Well, the “summer slide” can happen in chess too.

Recognizing that we needed to do something about this, two years ago in the summer of 2013, we started a city-wide chess league, where kids could gather to play chess for fun once a week. This was the beginning of what is now the non-profit Madison City Chess League (MCCL). Our attendance has grown, and we now meet weekly at the local YMCA where kids get to gather and play chess for free.

This summer MCCL will hold a June blitz tournament and a July summer chess camp that ends with a tournament to help our kids continue to develop their chess skills and prevent that “summer slide.”

 

Madison chess kids with their favorite international master-- Danny Rensch.

Network of Support

After testing the ChessKid.com program at Rainbow, Madison City Schools agreed to purchase a site license for every elementary student in Madison. Six of our seven elementary schools had students competing at elementary nationals for the first time, and they all used the program to work puzzles, watch videos, and do computer workouts to prepare.

The Madison City Chess League tried something new this year to support the Madison kids during Nationals. MCCL helps place volunteer chess coaches in all of our schools, and even shared coaches between the two Madison middle school teams.  Using this system of sharing and leveraging resources, we asked our most experienced coaches to travel to nationals with us and divided all Madison kids (not just the ones from Rainbow) among the coaches to go over their games in between rounds. 

Noel Newquist, who serves as secretary of our MCCL board and chess coach for Heritage Elementary, was assigned our beginning players.  He was assisted by our top middle school student, Michael Guthrie, who volunteered as junior coach at Nationals. Paul Mulqueen, who will be coaching our high school teams next year volunteered to coach at nationals. Our middle school team coaches, Don Maddox and FM Bradley Denton, helped as well.  And MCCL procured private donations to help pay for the volunteer coaches’ lodging and meals.

 L to R: Constance, Maanasi, Ranae Bartlett, Geon, and Noel Newquist after we found out the team won first!

This new program of sharing resources was tested in the most dramatic way in the final round of the K6-U1000 section when West Madison Elementary student Aubteen Pour-Biazar was paired against Rainbow Elementary student Mercedes Zich—both from Madison and MCCL members, and both going into round seven with five points.

Rainbow needed Mercedes to win to seal the championship, but our other Madison student, Aubteen, wanted to win to secure an individual trophy. Both were assigned to work with Coach Mulqueen throughout the tournament. Round seven was intense.  In the end, Aubteen won the round, and I hugged both kids when they came out—congratulating Aubteen and consoling Mercedes. 

Rainbow ended up winning the championship despite the seventh-round loss, and we did it with our ethics intact.  There was no way we would ask one student to throw a game so another could win a championship.  I tell every student going into a match to do his or her best, no matter the opponent.

 Aubteen from West Madison and Geon from Rainbow both achieved six points!  Waiting on trophies.