Building players up

[David Blower]

What type of things do you say to encourage juniors, ESPECIALLY if they are feeling bad after losing a game.

Please tell me that you do not end up saying things like: "Your be playing for England one day," or "in about 5 weeks your be beating me."

[Michael Flatt]

I find the best thing is not to dwell on it. Nothing you can say will help.

If you have time, simply offer to go through the game with them and do a little bit of coaching.

[Paolo Casaschi]

What type of things do you say to encourage juniors, ESPECIALLY if they are feeling bad after losing a game.

"Let's go for ice cream!"

[John Swain]

Depending on their age, how well I know them and the circumstances of the game, I sometimes tell juniors 'You only improve by losing!' However, it requires some maturity to appreciate that you rarely learn much from your wins but a lot from analysing your losses. If you can identify something concrete for improvement, taking something positive from a defeat, you should be able to help juniors to bounce back.

[Kevin Thurlow]

"Let's go for ice cream!"

That would cheer me up...

But I think John and Michael are right.

I have pointed out that they shouldn't feel bad when they have lost to an experienced opponent. One pupil lost because of a theme they hadn't seen before. I explained it to them and about a week later they rang up to say they had just won using the same thing. And I'm sure every other coach does this. Juniors are going to encounter ideas that they haven't been taught yet, (there are a lot of ideas), and maybe falling for them is the best way to remember not to do it again.

[Philip Adams]

There is some good advice, in my opinion anyway, on this and many other junior chess issues at

https://www.utdallas.edu/chess/educatio ... enulty.pdf