You could argue that Casual Chess could do the same; organise a few tournaments and use the surplus to go some way to funding other activities.Alex Holowczak wrote: ↑Fri Jun 22, 2018 9:19 amI may have misunderstood, but why does the ECF need to spend money on that?Andrew Zigmond wrote: ↑Thu Jun 21, 2018 11:05 pmAt the same time I coach ten lads aged between 12-14 locally (girls are very welcome but I've yet to have any interest) and the absence of age appropriate events open to them is shocking. So if there was money available from the ECF for chess development I'd like to think that males were not excluded.
I organise maybe 4 or 5 junior tournaments around Warwickshire each year. They're just 5-round graded Rapidplays over an afternoon, £10 entry fee. Why couldn't Yorkshire do that? The limiting factors initially were: (1) Finding someone who wanted to put the effort in to organise them (2) Online entry/website, setting up a system for people to enter online, and (3) Finding schools who are in the business of renting out their facilities to external bookings with available space.
The tournaments break even, and help to subsidise the rest of the county's junior activity (e.g. entry fees for things like Junior 4NCL and the EPSCA events).
Yorkshire could easily do the same sort of thing if it could find a way of overcoming (1), (2) and (3) above.
I have long been of the opinion that the ECF should use any surplus to create a fund from which individuals could apply for grants to promote chess activity. We touched on this on the Casual Chess Cafe thread but such grants should be used to increase the player base and not (the example I gave on that thread) so the Bogborough rapidplay can have a bigger prize fund for their anniversary event.