Chess’ greatest challenge: girls
The Virginian-Pilot
By Lisa Suhay
In the world of chess, boys are always in, but U.S. Chess Federation numbers confirm girls are out the minute they hit the teens. Where is Heidi Klum when girls need her most? We need the fashion-forward players as model minds to keep girls in the game of chess rather than dropping out in droves as they reach puberty.
In fact, overall, chess is crying out for a fashion edit.
Of the 700 million chess players worldwide, 45 million are Americans. Half of those are children. Next Saturday, National Chess Day, will be a sad reminder that teen girls are losing an opportunity for a life map to critical thinking and scholarships.
We don’t have to lose girl players to the Terrible Ts: Twitter, Twilight and tween angst. We can change the approach for girls and decrease their hasty exit.
Not surprisingly, of the 1,100 International Grandmasters in the world, only two dozen are women. The United States has only one – Susan Polgar, who is Hungarian-born and naturalized. Only 1 percent of the U.S. Chess Federation’s adult membership is female.
Despite the fact that Heidi Klum, Christina Ricci, Sandra Bullock, Salma Hayak and Madonna all play, the stereotypical public image of chess is still one of stuffy exclusivity, populated by disheveled, older men with seriously quirky natures.
As an official IOC Olympic sport, chess makes curling look sexy.
It’s a team sport. In high school, a student can letter in chess. As Norfolk’s new superintendent of schools, Richard Bentley, embarks on the creation of a state chess league that will make that possible for students here, statistics show we will see those letters mainly on boys’ jackets.
But after attending the five-day Susan Polgar Foundation Girls’ Invitational in Lubbock, Texas, and staying in the dorms with the girls, I now have a better handle on how to help our girls here.
In five sleepless nights as I sat in the hallways packed with boards, clocks and girls ages five to 18, breathing in the scent of nail polish remover, I learned a lot about little girls who can tear you up on the 64 squares while painting their toenails ice blue, listening to an iPod, texting, singing, giggling, gossiping and munching apple chips.
It is both a humbling and mildly terrifying experience to have an adorable 6-year-old girl multitask and checkmate you into oblivion. Which I suspect is the reason behind the programs by the American Association of University Women, the Carnegie Center and others to get girls into science, technology, engineering and math. Ladies, we need to talk. Let’s do coffee across a chess board and I think we can fix all our problems.
Even at the tournament, the girls were relaxed, happy and exchanging little tokens of esteem, very unlike the mixed boy/girl tournaments I have seen over the years where you can cut the gender anxiety and head-games with a battle ax.
If chess is going to be redesigned to be more girl-friendly, as experts like Dr. Alexey Root have suggested, it should start with non-rated girls’ tournaments. Rating tournaments merely encourages a toddlers-in-tiaras-worthy conflict of superior and inferior labels. Girls don’t need more labels. They’re already coping with body-image hate, acne and boys.
To keep girls in, we need to focus on the game. To bring more boys and girls from our state into the game and build their critical-thinking skills, focus and life strategies, a group of community partners has formed, including: the NPS’ superintendent, the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk State and Old Dominion universities, teachers, parents, The Virginian-Pilot and the Carnegie Math and Science Initiative for Girls. The group is called the Norfolk Initiative for Chess Excellence. That means we are N.I.C.E.
When people come to Norfolk, we will teach them to play the N.I.C.E. way, starting March 2-3 at Virginia’s first-ever all-girl state chess championship. All Virginia girls ages 5-18 can enter for free, rated or unrated, and play for scholarships. And we will give a free chess-in-education seminar for teachers while the girls play.
We are going to send fun, free, unrated, rewarding chess down the runway and see how it scores.
Guest columnist Lisa Suhay runs a free community partnership – Norfolk Initiative for Chess Excellence (N.I.C.E.) in Virginia. Email: Lsuhays2@cox.net.
Source: http://hamptonroads.com
Unfortunately, the USCF hasn’t done much to help girls in chess.
The USCF brass is actually clueless about promoting chess to girls.
Dear Above…I’m quite sure the US Brass knows..(they’re not stupid)I’m been starting to work with them in US kids stuff…it’s just not an issue they’ve addressed..they’re just killing themselves with nothing budgets to get the best out of what they have…but I can assure you..I’ll certainly keep that in mind in the future with my contributions.
The people there that I have been working with recently are rational..kind..thoughtful and well…fun..so I’m sure we can work into this issue.
Mike Magnan
Instead of surrounding themselves with people who understand what it takes to make it work, they hire clueless political sock puppets. No money isn’t an excuse. There’re plenty of sponsors and supporters out there. They just don’t want to deal with the USCF and their corrupt chess politicians.
You]re screaming at air…(above) won’t change anything.
Like I learned
as
as a baby..its a lot easier to piss on a fire than it is to start one.
THings can happen if we all do it…criticizing things is the work of morons who have no answers.
Ock pullet!?!? bleh…only someone totally ignorant could actually articulate such a moronic notion.
There are many decent and good people at the USCF…same as here in the CFC..of course there is corruption ..of course we need to root em ou…but its really bad if we burn the whole house down and lose our best.
I did not see much said about the stage where it is time to transfer all these girls over to the Open environment.
Or is this part not considered?
Garvin, that’s the connundrum. We want girls to stay in chess, and so we create female chess ghettos for them to play in, their ELOs do not advance and their chess prowess stagnates. The best female players won’t make much money and will drop out anyway, because they can use their time to much more lucrative advantage elsewhere. In the meantime, the issues about females facing playing in mixed opens remains and isn’t dealt with. I’d rather see development classes in tactics and strategy geared toward the female ability to multi-task. I believe that females can excel at rapid analysis for multiple alternative moves — they just don’t know it yet! I suspect that the categorization process that is involved is little different from the female ability to multi-task as described in the article. It’s well known that males have more difficulty doing this because of differences in how female and male brains work. One is not better or worse, they’re just different. So let’s start putting those differences to work in favor of the females for a change.