New constitution

[WBuchanan]

I am trying to be helpful here…others have already hinted at some of the points below but I thought it might be useful to bring these together.

“A player could be accepted by selectors as eligible on any basis whatsoever. “
Not true. The selectors can only select from those with a ‘SCO’ designation. And no-one will be given that designation by Chess Scotland without satisfying the qualifying criteria. What we are really debating is not only what those criteria should be, and whether they should be ‘enshrined’ in the constitution, requiring a change to the constitution if it ever needs to be amended for whatever reason. Those are both issues which can be validly debated.

By way of clarification the rules as drafted apply not just to being ‘Scottish Champion’ but to any present and future National Individual Title including those which are gender or age-related. When we are talking about representing Scotland in international competition, this applies not only to the Olympiad team but also many other gender and age-related competitions too, both team and individual.

For this and other reasons I would be strongly opposed to having a 5-year residence qualification as suggested. Here are a couple of scenarios (I am sure others could occur):
1. The child of a family who are legal immigrants is playing in Scotland and is therefore assigned a ‘SCO’ designation, However he is unable to be selected to represent Scotland in Glorney/Faber Cup or any other International, European and World Events. By the time he qualifies to play, he may no longer be a Junior.
2. FIDE in their wisdom decide to resurrect the ‘Student Olympiad’ competition which used to occur on a regular basis. Scotland would not be able to choose any representatives who were born outside Scotland. That would ‘take out’ a fair proportion of the potential team.

“I expect that many CS members would prefer to be at the 'disadvantage' of not having non-Scottish players in the team.”
What do you mean by ‘Non-Scottish’ ?. Many players who have a ‘SCO’ designation but were not born in Scotland have represented Scotland in some capacity or other (Open, Womens, Junior and Senior competitions of various kinds). Most of those qualified to obtain the ‘SCO’ designation because they live and play in
Scotland. I can’t recall anyone with Scottish parents or grandparents who actually transferred federations and then played for Scotland. Does anyone believe there is going to be a tsunami of those wishing to do so now? And that selectors, would be willing to select them?

Hi again Alastair

Your first para says Not True but selectors decide whether to select someone according to criteria decided on by CS. Any basis that CS wants to specify, as long as its been specified in the SCO code.

Yes we are debating eligibility but not in a context in which an amendment to the criteria can readily be specified as that would have to be in the SCO code the details of which are to be specified once the constitution has been voted in. Would you agree that this makes democracy harder on the issue of the eligibility criteria?

On my five year residency suggestion I thought we had that already, or have had it recently..so it can't be that ridiculous surely. Yes obviously for juniors it would need to be amended, but it's easily done eg the current proposal has a one year residency and nobody has argued against that. On student Olympiads, this is a shorter kind of residency and nobody has objected to CS having the flexibility to deal with that so I'm not sure why that shoulld be an argument against having a sensible residency threshold when such a threshold would clearly be relevant.

You can look for holes in my choice of words but by "non-Scottish" I only meant players who didn't meet the criteria for a Scottish connection, whatever was specified by the membership, not me. I was after all referring the the views of members. This was in answer to your response that CS wanted "flexibility" to avoid "disadvantage". And when did I say anything suggesting a tsunami? We are discussing the criteria for players in general whether one or a whole team. You cant ask for a certain power to be granted and simultaneously say it would never be used and also present objections as being based on exaggerated numbers.

I've limited facility, sorry... Will complete post shortly.
Cheers