2014 Junior International Events

[Linda McCusker]

Interesting idea but as I have argued previously I do not think that sending junior players to international events is necessarily the best way to improve the long term future of chess in Scotland. I have no doubt that if the right players play more international events they will get better however if you define 'long term future' as an increasing numbers of players then I suspect funding a few juniors is unlikely to do this. I would also argue that actually the money would be better spent on for example engaging the services of an experienced coach to develop a Scottish Chess School that would better chess-educate both the players and their coaches.
Personally I think that the future of scottish chess is about ensuring that players keep playing, at all levels and ages.
Do not misunderstand me - I am not arguing against the ideal or the indeed the necessity to provide funding for playing abroad representing Scotland, I am just not convinced that one does this for the long term future of chess in Scotland.

I completely agree with Mike's comments.

Looking at the long term future of chess in Scotland re juniors I believe it would make much more sense to play the numbers game. Chess Scotland should think about a programme which involves setting chess clubs up within Scottish schools. This would allow hundreds of thousands of juniors to experience chess and those who really enjoy playing chess could be encouraged to join their local chess clubs. If only 1% of school pupils involved carried on playing chess into adulthood this would increase the numbers of people playing chess in Scotland dramatically, eg in 2013 there were 673,530 pupils in publicly funded schools; 1% of this is 6735

Obviously setting up chess clubs in Scottish schools is a huge task, but hey, if the all party Parliamentary group lobbying next month for for chess to be recognized as a sport is successful there might be funding available to make this a possibilty. Fingers crossed :-bd