This article is the last of three in the Cape series. The first two can be found below:
http://chasingraces.blogspot.com/2022/07/to-cape-with-team-mp-chess.html
http://chasingraces.blogspot.com/2022/07/in-cape-with-team-mpumalanga.html
On the 1st of July, the first day of the Training Camp, we sat at the breakfast table with the team Managers and coaches. The aim was to ascertain what they had planned for the kids and whether or not it would be sufficient for this level of play.
Dumisa and I were there as Technical
Officials recommended by the province to National, our roles in relations to Team Mpumalanga
was quite unclear, that is why the current President could tell us to stay out
of Team MP business and let him run down his ship. We complied, only because
the tension was too much for us to continue attempting to reason with him.
We asked the team what equipment they had and what they had planned
to do in the training camp. There were no clear answers and clearly no one willing to take charge as
there was no Head-Coach to account. Since this was more of the technical part
of Chess, Dumisa and I figured it was necessary that we take full control and
lead the session.
We explained that this training session would need to serve
as preparation for all parties involved; The players needed to have practice
playing using clock and notating their moves (They had not been notating at all the qualifying levels). The Coaches would use the notations
from the games played to assess the strength of their teams and use that to
plan presentations of the aspect of the game they felt their players were
lacking; also, this games could be used for doing post-game analysis with the
players. The team managers could schedule the sessions, provide pens, notation
pads and other assistance that both the players and coaches could need in these
sessions.
The plan was clear and everyone had a role to play. I emphasized
at some point that the role of the managers also included making sure that the
coaches perform their tasks of offering post-game analysis to all players after
the games, especially since there was no Head-Coach to manage the Coaches. The
team managers were also responsible for making sure that the players go to the
Team’s analysis room after finishing their games where they would find their
coach waiting and ready to analyze and offer corrective inputs (whether a game
was lost or won).
When we arrived at the training hall, we discovered that Team MP did not have Chess Clocks; no Demo-boards; no pens and notation pads. Just a few chess boards that the current president had the foresight to bring. This simply meant that the provincial chess team was never prepared to have a training camp.
We tried then and there to see what we could do with what we
had; fortunately, one female team manager had few copies of notation pads for
us to make copies of and hand to the players; the current president along with
one of the team managers tried to organize some pencils; we then asked the
players to use their cell phones to download the Chess Clock or the Lichess App
which had a chess clock we could use.
All seemed to be in order and the training was going
smoothly until we discovered that over half the players in Team MP did not know
how to notate; more than half of them were not comfortable using the chess
clock (the time pressure made them anxious, regardless of the time-control);
and a great deal of them did not have a sufficient grasp of the Basic Opening
Principles!
We had our work cut out for us. We separated the groups and
agreed that we would have one group do a lesson on Chess notations, while
another group does a session on the Basic Opening Principles. We asked the coaches
to volunteer themselves where they felt most comfortable; they pulled back.
Dumisa and I had to do those sessions too.
I presented the session on Opening Principles while Dumisa
was doing notations with another group.
We did not want to have the players who already knew how to
notate and played good chess to be left behind, so we arranged them and had
them play a formal game with clocks and notations. Their games were to be
analyzed by their coaches in their relative age groups.
The coaches were committed, present and wanted to be of service but they lacked in content. They talked, loud even but it was clear, even to the players, that they had no direction. In some cases it was the lack of coaching experience where a coach knew how to play but hardly ever made time to coach others, so he was unable to tell when a player was not following; jumped from one concept to the next without being able to connect the concepts or check whether the players were following.
In other cases, the coaches were just less skilled than the
players they were coaching; the players had more playing experience and
sometimes more understanding of the content and the coach was simply in too
deep, so his ego got bruised, so he spoke louder changing the subject to the
history of Openings and his former days as a chess player.
We tried organizing a session with the coaches so we could
show them how to go about analyzing the players’ games but it felt like we were
teaching Chess theory to the coaches now. The team of 28 players had only one
Chess Coach and 7 managers, it was sad.
This had to be an opportunity for these kids to improve
their understanding of chess as some of them were obviously afforded a Chess
coach for the first time in this camp. Most of them had gotten to this level
just by being the proverbial one-eyed man (or woman) in the land of the blind
and the nationals were full of players who could see the full board all the
time.
Another opportunity lost.
After Dumisa and I have moved to the hotel where the Technical Officials were accommodated, we could not have contact time with the players. We worked as officials for the full duration of the event and could not even steal some time to analyze games with them.
In between bathroom breaks from the playing hall, I would
slide by the Team MP analysis room and find players sitting on the corner
licking their wounds while coaches are enjoying a chess game between
themselves. If I asked whether they had done analysis with the players, the
common responses would be “their notations were not clear so we could not
follow the game” (which made sense, somewhat)
This article is starting to drag; let me conclude with the
obvious: When people who are appointed or voted into positions fail to play
their roles well and fulfill their tasks, the children suffer the consequences.
There are children who were playing for the first and last time
in the Schools Nationals Chess Championships this year because of their age.
Their one-time experience has now become the opposite of what they had always
dreamt it would be. I worry that such experiences ruin the game for the players
and we end up losing them forever. Our communities are always offering
alternative activities to the kid, activities which are significantly more
destructive in nature. This is why when we catch some of the kids from falling
in those social traps and offer them chess, we intend to show them their true
worth and help them unleash their full potential so that they could help us
recruit their peers and help us improve our communities through sport.
Suitable Coaches were available and willing to assist the
province, and they will be available again next year. We can only hope that
when the time comes again soon for the province to send players to the
nationals, they are sure to appoint coaches that will have more to offer to the
players in their development.
Bear in mind, the effects of losing a Chess game could be
psychologically damaging to a person, especially if they do not understand how
they lost. The role of a coach is sometimes to help you discover how you have
lost, and show you how to do better next time, thus restoring hope.
Hope cures depression. Coaches are Healers!
Thank you for reading
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