Botswana Chess Federation (BCF) believes the only way to build a successful chess nation is to focus on giving players at grassroots level more exposure and making substructures across the country operational.
This is according to the newly elected BCF president Tshenolo Maruatona.
In his acceptance speech over the weekend, Maruatona said the federation has done exceptionally well in the senior categories.
“Clearly, there is a lot of groundwork that needs to be done at lower levels,” said the newly elected president.
With the blessing of his new committee, Maruatona’s commitment is to introduce chess at primary school level across the country.
He said his federation has to start on and implement the first phase of this grassroots project before the end of July. The federation needs to capacitate trainers, he said.
“Greatest chess players started playing the game at an earlier age and they were put through coordinated programs that saw them to stardom,” he said.
For grassroots development to be successful, Maruatona said it is based on the existence of functional structures that work towards a common goal.
As provided in their new executive committee, he said they will without failure put in place all the substructures and monitor their performance through continuous engagement.
He said the absence of substructures frustrate execution of programs on the ground as the current situation.
“Currently our chess teams are disjointed and some of them are not registered.
Our league committee is not in place hence the reason we do not have any local chess league,” said Maruatona.
It is therefore the new executive committee’s commitment to functionalize structures and capacitate all the members in pursuit of a coherent operational chess body that serves all various functions in the game.
Source: http://www.thevoicebw.com
Wise moves.