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Lothians congress/Dalguise
#11
Mike,

Yes, basically that would be the long term aim.

Now then, a few points of great interest from our tour yesterday....

We were very impressed with Dalguise. It is a terrific outward bound centre in a beautiful part of rural Perthshire with fantastic facilities including quad biking, zip wire, assault courses and muck in plenty ! The recently built lodge accomodation is excellent, en-suite bathroom for every room etc. The day is made up of team building exercises guided by first class staff that are solely dedicated to your group for the weekend. At 7pm chess starts, when everyone has had dinner and cleaned up. The chess is lower key, 3 allegro rounds on the Friday night, with 3 more on the Saturday night but fits ideally into the framework of the weekend. We had an opportunity to speak to not only establshed older juniors like Sam Gregory and Matthew Thomas, but also rapidly improving younger players like Colin Howie, Leora Wadler and Iona Bryson to name just a few of the 32 juniors that were there. John and Lynsey Shovlin deserve enormous thanks for making this weekend so professional and organised over the last 8 years. David Grant and Vivek Pathi were on hand to give valuable help. A wonderful opportunity for parents to send their chess playing offspring to have a fun weekend, play chess and make new friends in a very professional setup.

It was a good opportunity yesterday also for Paul and I to meet juniors and parents at the Lothians congress. I am obviousy particularly pleased with the fantastic positive feedback we are getting from the Euroyouths in Bulgaria. Paul was most impressed with the overall standard of play of our juniors, some of whom he had not met before. It seemed a shame to us that these two events clashed. I am sure that there must have been a lot of juniors that would have liked to attend both of these excellent events but were unable to do so because of the clash of dates. It is possible that the Lothians congress lost around a dozen or so entries because of this date problem. Perhaps in the future this issue could be resolved to everyone's advantage.

We also have a coaching issue.

Liam Richmond is travelling to Hamilton from Oban for coaching.
Iona Bryson is travelling from Dumfries to Hamilton for coaching.
Declan Shafi is looking for a coach in the Dundee area.

I thought it would be a good idea to put this on here first to make everyone aware of the situation and hopefully some people will come forward once they see this obviously worrying situation. Please get in touch with anyone involved in junior chess like Paul, Phil or myself if you feel that you or someone you know can be of assistance. It would be most appreciated.

Robin.
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