English Chess Forum

A new chess club for children aged 7-16 in the SW16 will be starting up on Friday 20th March.

http://www.streathamknights.co.uk/#!fri ... club/c1k84

If this gets around, you could be inundated. A few years back, my local cricket club advertised Friday night coaching for kids. Within a few weeks, they had 150 turn up. Hardly any could play cricket, of course. But no matter: the scheme looked to be a success.

And then the penny dropped.

At £5.00 per head (£7.50 for two) for 90 minutes, this represented the bargain of a lifetime. Grateful parents would drop off their sprogs, then nip off and do the weekend shopping, or whatever. It was the cheapest child-minding they'd ever seen. Eventually the cricket club caught on, and shifted the sessions to a Monday. Fifteen turned up then.

Sad and disspiriting. But true

150 would be a problem. I’ll only be taking 8 chess sets.

Back in the nineties I saw a junior chess club descend into a glorified child minding service. My personal suggestion would be to put a disclaimer saying that a certain standard of behaviour is expected and that you reserve the right to exclude children if their behaviour is unacceptable.

Andrew Zigmond wrote: My personal suggestion would be to put a disclaimer saying that a certain standard of behaviour is expected and that you reserve the right to exclude children if their behaviour is unacceptable.

I’ve run many events - tournaments, structured chess courses, one-off training days etc - and I’ve yet to find this to be an issue. Maybe because of how I market my chess events, who knows?

Anyhoo, a disclaimer - aside from being unnecessary - strikes me as rather unwelcoming.

Jonathan Bryant wrote:150 would be a problem. I’ll only be taking 8 chess sets.

Good luck, great idea

I was going to post a niggle about 7-16 being a bit of a wide age range but that's a wider topic. As Mick says, I hope the new venture goes well.

Andrew Zigmond wrote:As Mick says, I hope the new venture goes well.

Thanks to you both.

It already is going well I think. . Half the places for the first night are already spoken for. That's less than a week after the initial announcement and in my experience take up usually increases the nearer you get to the date of the event.

More generally, two existing chess clubs not withstanding, there was - other than the hit or miss of after school chess clubs - no provision for junior chess in Streatham before I started a year ago. Now there is. That alone would be encouraging but more than that numbers have been decent (without becoming enormous) and seem to be growing. Beyond the numbers, my events are hugely more mixed in terms of gender and ethnicity than you would normally expect to find in traditional chess clubs.

Like the poster etc. Looks great. Expect you will be full. Best wishes.

Thanks Nick.

The very best of luck with this. We'll share experiences some time, I hope.

Thanks Paul - and definitely hope so.

On the off-chance that anybody is interested:-

the event was oversubscribed. On the evening two children (who’d paid) didn’t turn up so I was able to take somebody on the reserve list.

Predominantly boys but about 25% of those attending were girls. Not satisfactory and yet at the same time much better than most adult chess clubs manage (certainly better than mine). As with my previous events, the club was much more diverse in terms of ethnicity than traditional chess clubs

The children who came along were all primary school aged. This was as expected as I do most of my work in primary schools and I (deliberately) made on conscious effort to market the club to older children. This is something that I will begin to do in the future when I get things more established.

Also as expected, there was no sign of any children being dumped as childminding service. There was one lad who had been encouraged to attend with his older brother who didn’t enjoy it hugely, but that was he’d been persuaded to 'give it a go' and his mother had approached me about this beforehand.

I’ll be starting a weekly club after Easter. Around half of the places are already booked and I haven’t really started advertising it yet.

Yes, interested, and thanks for the progress report - I think posting here may serve as a type of diary, and looking back may help you (and others) reach conclusions and learn lessons?

Thanks for the encouragement Mick.

Easter Holidays coming up. When I get a moment I might knock-up a quick 'So you want to start a junior chess club?' post.