Copied from Alex's article:
What Makes a Successful County Chess Association?
Wearing my Warwickshire hat, rather than any ECF or other official hat, I wondered what other counties were doing, not doing, and what we could be doing better in Warwickshire. This led to me writing a list of all the things I thought a county should do, looking to see which county was doing what, and then weighting it in some way to determine which counties were doing the most things I would expect them to do.
With the publication of this article in ChessMoves I am perfectly aware that this is likely to ignite fury amongst counties throughout England (especially if your county appears near the bottom), and so it is extremely important to set out a few important points before going into it in more detail.
Firstly, it is not a commentary on the skills of volunteers who give up their time for chess across the country. Everybody’s effort is very welcome, and I am sure I speak for the ECF when I say that volunteers are greatly appreciated in keeping chess going in England. There may be perfectly good reasons why it would make sense for your county to be at the bottom of the index ranking. If FIDE were conducting a similar exercise, one of the characteristics it would include is ‘Does the federation have a chess in schools program?’ (I know it’s ‘Programme’, but FIDE probably wouldn’t spell it properly.) For England, the answer would be ‘No’, and there would be a lot of surprise that a major European nation doesn’t have one. However, the answer is that there is a very successful chess in schools programme in England – it is just organised independently of the national federation by Chess in Schools and Communities. Another similar example is the ECF not organising the national league – the 4NCL does. English chess benefits from CSC and the 4NCL, but it does not do their work itself.
Several counties therefore have a lot of things going on, which do not count towards things they are doing because they are organised independently. For example:
• Some of the largest weekend chess tournaments in England are not organised by the county chess associations. Scarborough (Yorkshire) and Frome (Somerset) are two examples that spring to mind.
• People such as Adam Raoof, who organises a huge volume of chess tournaments across London, are organised privately rather than by Middlesex, Surrey and others. They all contribute greatly to chess in those counties, but the county does not organise them.
There are some features of the index where independent work is included in the index score. The most obvious example is membership data, where players can be members from the area without playing in countyorganised activity. Clubs are independent by their nature, but some counties have several leagues. Yorkshire has an extensive array of leagues to complement the Yorkshire League. Warwickshire has three leagues, but no overarching competition to determine a champion club.
Perhaps the greatest area where independent work is included is junior chess. Can you imagine if the county FA were not involved in junior football, or if the county cricket board were not involved in junior cricket? It may come as a surprise to some readers to learn that a significant amount of junior chess in England is conducted by independent junior county associations, and not by the county itself. I came to a compromise in my thinking in thisarea: the activity of the junior county is included in the work of the county association, but there is an arbitrary deduction from the overall index because of the separation. In most cases, this still resulted in a small net plus for the county.
The index is divided into eight key areas. Before discussing each of these areas, the next disclaimer is that the
information included here was found by scouring websites: the ECF LMS, the ECF voting register, and any other sources I could find. When it came to county websites, the longer I had to spend finding information the less likely I was to award a positive contribution to the index if I had to make a judgement call on whether an event was still happening, for example.
The first area is membership data. Dave Thomas produces high quality data every year which breaks down our membership numbers by category, county and other characteristics, which can be found on the ECF Documents page of the ECF website. The key statistic there is members per 10,000 in the population, which I trebled by means of a weighting. There was a little artistic licence in the data – it is very difficult to get precise population figures for chess counties given their significant overlap with modern administrative boundaries. But where there have been estimates, they should hopefully not make too much difference.
The second area is four key champions that I think a county should have: A county champion, women’s champion, junior champions (in different age groups), and a club champion. I also included a rapidplay and blitz champion when I realised that some counties were doing them, but chose not to weight them. In several cases the junior champion is being awarded by the juniors-only county association. There were a variety of ways in which the county individual championship was awarded, ranging from a series of tournaments (either organised by the county, or independently of it) to an evening knock-out tournament. Only Hampshire had a stand-alone women’s championship, as opposed to awarding it to the highestplaced female player in an open tournament. For most counties, they run a league and the winner of it is the club champion for the county. Some counties operate a cup competition instead.
The third area involves county team participation. Three points were awarded if a county entered any form of primary and secondary school competition. This might be activity being done by the junior-only organisation; and in some areas at primary school level, the boundaries of the junior administration and the adult administration are not the same. In some cases, they are even called different things. Nevertheless, primary schools are where intercounty chess is the most popular at junior level. Very few counties can enter a full suite of teams into the ECF
County Championship or the union stages these days, and so each team earned a point towards the index. This benefits the more populous counties, but given that even quite small counties are successful in putting teams out I decided not to weight that.
The fourth area is ‘other chess activity’, which includes the leagues (including the county-organised leagues), clubs, and other tournaments that the county organises. Counties that run junior grand prix events scored well here. Clubs and leagues were normalised relative to the population of the county. Other tournaments were capped at three points because I felt that counting every one of the 12 junior tournaments organised by some counties would disproportionately weight it. Two counties have primary school team championships. Now I have seen this, I am surprised that more counties aren’t exploring doing something like this.
The fifth area is internet presence. Wearing lots of hats at the same time, one of the most common questions I get is ‘My child would really like to play chess! Where can he/she go to play?’ In some cases this means finding a local contact I have, or looking on a website. Perhaps if the information were easily available on the website more parents would be able to work this out for themselves? In any event, just about all counties have a website that I could find from Google. One website had an expired security certificate and so couldn’t be reached via Google – and was marked accordingly as not having one, because there seems little point in having a website if nobody can access it. Several counties have out of date websites, which I marked down. One or two counties had more than one website – clearly a change of webmaster had caused a change in website, and the old one hadn’t been laid to rest. I didn’t mark this down. With websites counting five points towards the index, I divided five points up between Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The absence of chess counties from social media seemed like the most obvious growth area – it is where a lot of players who may be new to the game will find out about things and may decide to get involved themselves.
The next two categories can be grouped together as ‘resources’. The ECF maintains very good lists of arbiters and coaches. To get on the list of arbiters an arbiter needs to attend a course and pass a test. The current course fee is £40, and after that all costs are paid for in terms of FIDE licensing and title applications. The list of coaches is entirely free to get on, and for that reason it is surprising how few coaches are taking advantage of this resource. I wonder how many of these arbiters and coaches, who could assist in the development of chess in each county, are unknown to the county association? The number of arbiters and coaches was broken down by level and weighted according to the population of the county.
The final category is the category of things I couldn’t easily find a home for elsewhere. I have already mentioned the deduction for separated junior/adult county associations. The other aspect is safeguarding policies. I was surprised at how few counties have published their safeguarding
policy on their website. Where there is a separate junior county association they are very good at publishing their safeguarding policy (and several other very sensible policies besides).
What else could go in this index that isn’t in it?
• Human resources in arbiters and coaches are well-established. One growth area might be to include organisers, although that would involve
the ECF setting up a new voluntary post to create the courses and manage the system…
• It could be possible to include the tournaments not organised by the county, but weight it in such a way as to not overwhelm the index. There is a
huge number of events going on in standardplay, rapidplay and blitz, and I deemed it too timeintensive to count them all up.
• The rating of the top ten players. This is FIDE’s sole criterion for its equivalent index, but this seemed to disproportionately benefit the more
populous counties. In addition to that, it isn’t necessarily a measure of the county’s activity.
I hope that this index initiates discussion, and may be a useful summary of what counties are doing and not doing. It may even make counties think ‘Oh, why don’t we do that?’, and start new initiatives. I am sure several of you will write to me – with varying levels of appreciation for the time I spent compiling this – to say that I’ve made mistakes for your county, and that’s fine. It is published as a Google sheet deliberately, so that I can make updates to it if mistakes are pointed out to me.
The index can be found here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing
