Fair Haven (Vermont) school to send a chess hero to nationals
April 26, 2006
By Gordon Dritschilo
Herald Staff (Vermont)
For a school that banned playing chess, Fair Haven Union High School has a pretty good chess team.
Senior Dillon Russell-Kenniston and junior Oliver Chase went 5-0 in the Vermont State Scholastic Chess Championship held April 8 in Richmond, sharing honors as the state’s high school chess co-champions. One of them will represent Vermont at the national tournament in mid-August, and two other members of the Fair Haven team placed at states.
Fair Haven has sent a team to the tournament for the past three years, according to coaches Toby Milne and Betty Russo, each time returning with a champion player.
“We used to come and play all the time during study hall,” said Russell-Kenniston, 18. “Then the high school banned chess. It originated with card games. The administration said they didn’t want us playing cards in school. Then some teacher said if they ban card games, they should ban all games.”
Jeff Scott, a 17-year-old senior who tied for fifth place at the state tournament, was quick to jump in and say that the team has the administration’s full support.”
The School Board recently started a chess club fund so we can send a player to the (national) tournament,” he said. “Banning chess, it sounds lame, but they’ve been supportive of us.”
Russo said a minor controversy had brewed over how to determine whether Russell-Kenniston or Chase, who was co-champion with a Burlington student last year, should go on to nationals. She said the published rules for the tournament break ties by weighting the opponents faced by each player, ranking the player with more difficult foes.
Under that system, Russell-Kenniston was the winner. However, Russo said some state tournament organizers want to see a playoff match between the two students. She said she expected a ruling from tournament organizer Everett Marshall.
Chase could not make an interview attended by his other three winning fellow-teammates on Monday afternoon and could not be reached by phone, but described his chess background in an e-mail.
He wrote that he began playing chess seriously in eighth grade with other students during recess. He started playing on the Internet and at the Rutland Chess Club before discovering chess tournaments.
Chase said he has attended several tournaments, including the world open in Philadelphia, which has an entry fee of $300. He went to the national tournament last year.
In March, Chase said he spent a week in Moscow, studying with chess giants Susan Polgar and Anatoly Karpov. His teammates, including Russell-Kenniston, characterized him as their strongest player.
Now the team is looking at how to pay to send its chosen champion, whoever that may be, to the tournament in Illinois.
“It’s a seven-day tournament,” Russell-Kenniston said. “There’s one game each day.”
The team members said they expected to need $1,200 to send a player to the tournament. The winner of states gets $400 toward expenses to go to nationals, they said, and the group is looking into other available grants and soliciting the sponsorship of local businesses.
Russell-Kenniston said his mother taught him to play chess when he was six.
“After a game or two, I beat her,” he said. “She saw I had some talent and hooked me up with chess lessons.”
The rest of the article can been seen here. 
This is a very nice article. It’s unfortunate that some educators are still ignorant about chess.
I hope the teachers will change their minds about banning chess. How ridiculous!
Hmmm…banning children from playing all games. Excellent. Now, what else can we do to crush the human spirit? Maybe we should give them all Prozac and have them spend half the day watching television.
Sounds like a typical overreaction by school bureaucrats. We better put the hammer down now or else soon the kids will be skipping classes in droves in order to play chess in the library. Kudo’s to the schoolboard for setting up the chess fund.
Hey there-
I was doing a random search and was very surprised to find this article on someone’s blog. My name is Jeff Scott and I was a member of Fair Haven’s miniature Vermont chess powerhouse (which won 3 state championships and finished 2nd at New England Scholastics in 2005, we were very upset that this tournament did not occur in 2006 for I feel we were in the running). For the record, chess was not singled out by our school– it just fell into the category of other card and board games with a history of disrupting class. Our administration has been extremely supportive of chess– They put up money for us to play in a non-scholastic USCF tournament, provided transportation for our team despite the fact that our club was not “official,” and in general lauded our efforts. This article was well intentioned but it got too excited with the sensational catch phrase of “chess being banned.” It’s not like it was singled out or anything.
Hope this clears things up. I am available for contact at jcscott@uvm.edu.
Cheers,
Jeff
I am just glad that there are passionate students that take the time to make a Chess Club and organize it, and then win championships because it is something they truely care about about and work hard to overcome the obstacles their school has presented.