Scottish Tournaments - bring back the Challengers?

[Jonathan Livingstone]

Not wishing to appear awkward but what/where is the hope Hamish? I am more than willing to consider it, if anyone can show me it

3 Or 4 clubs that break the norms with a young average member age, along with larger/city clubs are a minority. For every club with a young average member age or large membership, there is another 10 or more that are struggling and seeing a decline in membership.

The situation is that it the majority (the small and declining clubs) are the ones that are dictating and shaping Scottish Chess. And for every rare instance where a new club has been formed in the last 20 years, how many clubs have folded? How many existing small clubs will still be around in 20 years?

We don't need to be naming particular clubs, but I am sure whatever part of the country your in, we can all think of a club or two where you would think they are on borrowed time.

[hamish olson]

But that is what hope is - not a guarantee but a potential. IF we can integrate the junior chess better with the adult chess and even have a 5% retention rate we would be doing fine! The fact is that loads of kids learn chess at school, play in schools events etc but we don't integrate them with adult clubs and it just becomes "something I really enjoyed at school". We have to do stuff to realise this hope obviously, it won't just happen of it's own accord.

[mclarke]

Re: Transitioning School Players to Clubs. We've been discussing this problem at LJC - probably the most successful part of our programme is the LJC team events, but when the primary kids go to high school, like Hamish describes thats it - they're gone. We tried to address this by running secondary team events this year, but we've found the majority are new kids taking the game up at secondary school.

One option we've discussed is to run some form of regular team event just for juniors at clubs. The train of thought would be that by having a competition just for junior clubs (on a very similar format to our team days which we run three times a year), would give a place for juniors (and there friends) to play together. And that it'd give clubs an immediate place for their juniors to play in a team competition.

At the moment, we lack evidence that this would help - I would be interested to hear if any of the clubs (not just Lothians), thought this competition would help or would be something they would consider entering?