Making the right moves

Check mates: Clio Area School District’s chess club making all the right moves
by Jared Field The Clio Messenger
Friday March 20, 2009, 11:00 AM

CLIO, Michigan — The revenge of the nerds is served on cafeteria tabletops all over the Clio Area School District these days.

Chess, a game maligned as uncool by the short-sighted, blinded by the bubble called adolesence, is becoming more and more en vogue from elementary school to high school.

For 10-year-old Trinten Patten, chess keeps the mind keen and, over time, he believes his passion for the game will pay off.

“Some people say it’s a nerdy sport, but I tell them that with Chess you can earn like $20,000 if you get really good at it — you can also get scholarships, too,” said Trinten, a member of a four-person team that placed 10th in the elementary school championship at Michigan State University in February.

Ten-year-old McKenna Daniel similarly sloughs off the perception.

“I kind of just say that it’s fun,” said McKenna, whose father was a student of Gene Hickey, director of the Clio Chess Club. “You can go all around the world, and you get to miss a couple days of school which is pretty cool, too.”

Coolest, perhaps, is what the game can do to sharpen the minds of the young and old.

Hickey, who has been playing chess since before Bobby Fisher became the first American world chess champion in 1972 — chess was cool then, and so it may be again.

“(The perception) still exists, but it’s getting better,” said Hickey. “We have a super program down at the elementary, and we have to curtail the number of students involved down to 100 — but down there they are just kids, they don’t have the peer pressure. Everybody loves Chess. I’m the gym teacher and I show them that we can do sports, but also sports of the mind as well. But as they come up through, the peer pressure gets worse.”

But, Hickey has a move for that — call it a gambit, for now.

“I tell them that you have to be your own person,” said Hickey. “If you’re not your own person, then someone else is forcing you to live their values, their life … why would you want to live your life that way?

“Don’t let someone else control you.”

Hickey tells his students that it’s only in school that some people look down on the intelligent. He tells his high school students that they go to school in an environment that’s far different from real life.

Here is the full article.