Feuding parents move battle off chess boards
By Daryl James
Tribune
Gilbert’s chess community will have a chance to shine this Saturday when schoolchildren from across the state gather at Greenfield Junior High School for grade-level championships. The state tournament will be the latest of many chess extravaganzas in Gilbert since the U.S. Chess Federation named the town “best in the nation” for chess in 1999. But all is not well with the chess superpower.
Some chess parents and coaches in the Gilbert Unified School District want nothing to do with Saturday’s event. More specifically, they want nothing to do with the event’s organizers – a group of parent volunteers concentrated at one school who took control of the community chess association in May 2005 following tense annual board elections.
Since then, the town’s chess factions have quarreled like the black and white armies on a game board.
“It’s no different than soccer or Little League or any other sport,” said Lynn Schucker, an association volunteer who helped bring Saturday’s event to Gilbert. “Politics are everywhere.”
During the Arizona Scholastic State Chess Championship last April at Gilbert High School, feuding Gilbert parents argued about everything from the display of banners to the proper place to eat snacks.
“The bickering has gone on so long,” said Jill McKeever, a Finley Farms Elementary School chess mom, former association president and chess coach at Islands Elementary School. “It’s gotten to this point now where we almost can’t talk to each other.”
CULTURE CLASH
The Gilbert rift started long before members of the Gilbert Parents Chess Association cast their ballots for new officers in May 2005.
Chess parents from Burk Elementary School have long done things differently than parents at other Gilbert schools.
“The philosophies of the organizations were always so different,” said Christy Veit, a chess mom at Canyon Rim Elementary School. “They didn’t get where we were coming from, and we didn’t get where they were coming from.”
The full article is here.
Very sad to see parents behaving badly!
It’s embarrassing for those of us in AZ. There’s a State tournament coming up and instead of a nice article promoting chess, we get this. )=
– Enrique
Reading the article one thing came to my mind: people are sick. In general.
From the beginning of times this is what people do. Everywhere, over any and all issues, let that be a major war, or something insignificant what the article describes. We mankind sorely need some more evolving, or whatever equivalent.
Gabor
The same thing happens in California, Chicago and New York so it has to happen on more local levels. Organizers and coaches in the northern CA and southern CA, Chicago and NY areas refuse to endorse, recomend, or even attend personally or send students to what they feel are rival events.
A previous scholastic nationals held in Chicago was poorly attended by the locals, because the local point-of-contact local organizer was either not in the loop with the majority of local coaches or perhaps hired only from within his group.
All one needs to do is look and you’ll see that if an event isn’t organized by so&so then certain so&so’s students aren’t going and neither are the students of the coaches who work for so&so. Even if it is a state or city championship.
It is a very sad situation. It happens in all fields too.
In order for a student to become strong, they should have strong peers. Not every coach can afford to limit the student’s activity based on personal needs. If what is good for the goose is good for the gander…
The prevailing regional attitudes and the school in this article, btw, is bad for the kids and the the rest of us 🙁
The previous poster is right. The same thing does happen in other places across the country and frankly, it disgusts me. The coach at my son’s school has discouraged parents from going to rival coaches’ tournaments, routinely badmouths rival coaches to send private coaching business to his friends and similar behavior. We ignore him and go to whichever tournaments we feel like going to but other parents are intimidated by the coach and stay away from rival coaches’ tournaments.
My son will participate in this tournament, but I never knew such a mess existed. Perhaps democracy is not the best form of governance for such events; so far I haven’t detected any such feuding in the tournaments organized by Chess Emporium (www.chessemporium.com) in Phoenix. They are a for-profit organization.
Regards,
Ravi
The human mind works this way. The problem is called Separation. The mind tells us we are all separate. The mind always puts down those separate from us.
This is the same thing played out in Iraq on the national level. All wars are the same. Caused by the idea of Separation.
The solution is ONEness. God is Love is ONEness. We are all ONE. When we criticize others we are always really criticizing ourself because there is no OTHER. there is ONLY the ONE. We come to the point of ONEness when we observe ourself for a long time and slowly come to realize that our own mind is insane and we come to trust the decisions we make based on LOVE which is not from the intellect.
If we use our insane mind to analyze out a solution we can rest assured it will ALWAYS be the WRONG solution. It has to be that way.
We need to get in touch with our feelings. Love comes from our feelings never from the intellect. So when we decide to love it come immediately from the heart. If we stop and “think” about it then the intellect will convince us not to “love”. To perform an act of love we need to be dedicated to love and while our mind is screaming at us not to do love we need to jump past our own mind and choose love anyway. This is not easy. It takes years of observing ourself closely.
By the way this is all part of the original teachings of Jesus which is kept hidden from us by the churches. This is what Jesus meant by Love.
And is part of what Jesus meant by NOT JUDGING. not judging is the first step in transforming and ancient enemy into love. and Jesus clearly said to love your enemy.
Love is God is the Answer to all problems.
so our first step is not to judge these chess parents but to observe the behavior and become aware of it without judgment. Eventually our own behavior will begin to change.
The idea that there are people out there doing these things who are separate from us is not a fact of truth. It is but an idea of my mind. The truth is that there is ONLY ONE. The mind tells us there is separation into millions of people. there is no “out there”. Everything is really happening in the mind. There is only the ideas in the mind of the ONE. Do not be fooled by your own human mind. It is not capable of Love.
Sounds just like the USCF, FIDE, the UN, the US Government and other National Governments. The dirty politicians have taken over the world! Hopefully with Susan Polgar on the Board of Directors of the USCF there will be one organization in the world that won’t play politics! Go Susan !