Check and mate!
By Kevin O’Brien
Before the 40 chess players in Edgar’s tournament left on Saturday, teacher Colin Hanson urged the students to apply the lessons of the game to the rest of their lives.
“You’ve got to think before you move,” he said, comparing the act of strategically pushing pieces on a board to the everyday decisions faced by young people.
Saturday’s tournament, which was sanctioned by the Wisconsin Scholastic Chess Federation (WSCF), was held just a year after the Edgar School District officially established its own team.
The event not only showcased Edgar’s players, who won first place in the team competitions, it also served as a fundraiser for a homeless shelter in Wausau. All of the proceeds from concessions will be donated to the shelter, and participants also brought in clothes, blankets and food items for those in need as part of the theme, “Putting Homelessness in Checkmate.”
Student chess players from several area school districts – Abbotsford, Colby, Marathon, Antigo and Mosinee – came to Edgar for the first-ever tournament, which featured five rounds of competition in two divisions (high school and middle/elementary). Twenty tables were set up at the back of the elementary school auditorium, and students and parents used the cafeteria next door to relax and buy concessions between games.
For years, Hanson said groups of kids have been playing games of chess in his fifth-grade classroom during recess, but it wasn’t until a couple of parents, Jen and Nate Olmsted, took some of them to a tournament in Antigo that the idea of forming an official club came up.
“When the kids came back from the tournament, they were so excited, and that kind of got the ball rolling,” he said Saturday. “So, I went to the school board. The school board has been very supportive, the community has been very supportive, and
See CHESS/ page 12
PUSHING PIECES - Blake Sternberg, a junior at Edgar High School, moves his queen into position while playing thirdgrader Kannon Hrdina in the final round of competition at the “Putting Homelessness in Checkmate” tournament held Saturday at Edgar Elementary. Forty students from around the area participated in the tournament. STAFF PHOTO/KEVIN O’BRIEN Chess
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we’re sitting here today with 40-plus kids from all over Central Wisconsin.”
Hanson said he started playing chess himself in seventh grade, when his teacher got him into the game and he signed up for the local club. As an educator, he now teaches a chess class during summer school.
With funding from the district, Hanson said the Edgar Chess Team has been able to compete in both online and in-person tournaments and pay for a WCFS-sanctioned tournament.
“It’s a wonderful opportunity,” he said. “We have kids that play sports and we have kids that are in band and choir, and we have kids who, this is their interest. We also have parents who love chess, so this is a lifetime activity.”
WSCF hosts online tournaments every Sunday, so Edgar students are able to play against their peers from across the state. Club members also get together for a weekly practice on Thursdays, and they are always looking for opportunities to play other teams in the area.
“We would love to partner up with Colby, Marathon, Abbotsford and Mosinee because they’re so close,” Hanson said. “It’s just a matter of finding the opportunity for bussing or driving.”
To teach kids a game that is relatively simple to learn but hard to master, Hanson said students start by just “pushing pieces” to learn the basic mechanics before moving on to learn various strategies and opening moves. He said many of the students in middle and high school are reading books and watching videos to learn more about the game and push themselves to “that next level.”
“When they go to a tournament, they want to have more success,” he said. “You need to think before you move, you need to look two or three moves ahead and plan things ahead to understand openings – not only what opening you want to use but how to recognize somebody’s opening so you can defend.”
What’s great about chess as a competitive activity is that it doesn’t matter what age you are or what your physical attributes might be, he said.
“It’s all about being on the board,” he said. Besides offering a chance for kids from the area to compete, Hanson said the tournament was also organized as way to raise funds during the post-Christmas time of year when charities often experience a downturn in donations. It was relatively easy to recruit participants based on word-of-mouth in the chess community, he said.
“Once we were able to get our tournament on the state calendar, I started sending it to other schools, and it just spread from there,” he said. “There’s a family here from Phillips. There’s a family from Plover.”
