22-12-2011, 12:25 PM
Quote:With talk of grading limits for Scotland's elite juniors.
Perhaps we should have grading limits for would be coaches for the Scotland elite juniors.!
Well, ideally we would! (Obviously such limits would scale with the age groups...) That said, we're in a situation where the budget for coaching is such that volunteers who give up their time to help out are valuable indeed.
Andy (H), I don't think anybody is disputing that in many cases juniors who go to these events improve significantly - though there is the point that it's quite rare for young juniors who spend a lot of time playing chess not to see a rise in playing strength. Junior addition, which we spent a bit of time talking about a wee while ago, reflects the fact that under-12s are expected to see a rating rise of 120 per season, and that's an average: the more active ones will in general be rising more swiftly than that.
Frankly I'd actually think Dougie's concern about the demoralising effect of repeated losses - while dangerous and real; chess being a game where, barring the weird, there's never anyone to blame but yourself for defeat means that successive losses can be extremely dispiriting - is partially neutered by squad size. It's much easier to lose quite a lot of your games when you've got friends around you also losing games, though it perhaps doesn't do an awful lot for our international reputation.
I just think that this need not be the only way to do it. Many of the same benefits could be gained by a better coaching regime - and here I'll say that I'm a big fan of the steps being taken under the current IJD setup to expand the online coaching structure - as well as travel to other, perhaps less challenging and expensive to reach tournaments. The idea mentioned by Robin and Calum of using large summer-holiday-time tournaments for this purpose seems like a good one. I just don't think we need to have a binary dichotomy between sending frankly enormous squads to the Worlds and Euros on the one hand and some strawman austerity regime where only people who can beat me get to enter these tournaments on the other.
Yes, I think that the requirements for selection for these tournaments are currently too loose. I'm not going to name examples, because that would be a deeply unfair thing to do. But that means I believe that it would be more helpful to provide different opportunities to lower-rated players at or near the top of their age groups, not that we should just kick away the ladder and giggle. I'm a bit disappointed at some of the responses which are essentially suggesting that we're trying to cancel Christmas here.
Incidentally, I'm hoping this post will make me Emanuel Lasker.
EDIT: Yes!