WEIBEL TEAMS SHINE AT THE ALL-GIRLS NATIONALS

WEIBEL TEAMS SHINE AT THE ALL-GIRLS NATIONALS
CHICAGO-April 17-19 2015

As most of you know already, the Weibel Teams that went to compete at the 12th Annual All-Girls Chess Nationals in Chicago the weekend of  April 17-19 2015 returned home with lots of hardware and another championship title.  This was the largest field of players in the history of the tournament. Three hundred and fifty eight players competed for individual and team titles. 

Weibel’s Under 12 Girls Team (Shivangi Gupta, Anvi Surapaneni, Enya Mistry and Amy Chan) followed in the footsteps of the teams of the last two years--they brought home the title defeating the New York chess powerhouse I.S. 318 by one point.  The top three players points are counted for the team score.  We had great depth.  If anyone of our second, third or fourth players fumbled we still would have brought home the title thanks to the strong play by Shivangi Gupta, the 2015 State Girls and Polgar Girls Champion.  Shivangi tied for fifth place in the individual competition along with Chenyi Zhao of Warm Springs Elementary.  Shivangi and Chenyi had tied for the Under 12 Polgar Championship.  Shivangi defeated Chenyi in the regular event but lost the chance to be the individual to receive Polgar Foundation funding for the World Youth Championship in the Fall.  Chenyi defeated Shivangi in the blitz play-offs.  Shivangi can still attend the World Youth Championships if she can find another source of funding.

Last year Weibel’s only girls team at the Championships was our U 12 Team.  This year, with a bit of arm twisting on my part, Weibel sent teams in the Under 8, Under 10 and indirectly in the Under 14 sections.  The four girls in the Under 14 section (Serafina Show, Raisah Khan, Sashrika Pandey and Sara Kaushik) were from Horner Junior High School.  They proudly wore their Weibel T-shirts and provided each of their opponents with Weibel patches.  I decided that I would have Weibel logo patches produced and the girls would give one to each person they played.  It is common in the World Youth Chess Championships to provide opponents with a symbol of one’s team or country.  When my boys played traveling soccer it was common to exchange patches or pins.  In fact, it was fun to watch them during half time, while eating their oranges, to be trading pins with players from other teams.   I also provided small California flags for our girls and a few other California girls to place by their chess boards so I could easily find them to take pictures.

The Horner Junior High School chess girls placed third in the team competition in the Under 14 division. I.S. 318 won this group as it has done for many years.  They placed two points ahead of us with a team from Memphis, Tennessee taking second with 11 to our 10.5 points. I thought we had a good chance to win the title from I.S. 318 this year until I saw the entries. I was very pleased we did as well as we did as the Under 14 section was the toughest field of the tournament.  We came in seeded fifth and so at third, we placed higher than our initial seeding.  Once again we had depth.  We would have placed in third even if one of our second, third or fourth girls had floundered.  It is always good to have a back-up player.  Serafina Show, our highest rated player, received 4.5 points out of six and tied for fourth.  I guess the best way I can explain how well she did is to mention that her U.S. Chess Federation rating jumped to 1874.  Raisah Khan also showed how well she played against the tough competition by going from a rating of 1331 to 1384.

I think I shocked everyone at this Friday’s team meeting when I said I was the proudest of our Under 10 Team

(Prisha Jain, Sophia Zhu and Kavya Peela).  After the first round the Weibel Team was in eleventh place. Slowly but surely the team kept moving up in the standings—eighth, sixth, fifth.  The organizers only provided four team trophies.  So I gave the three Under 10 players one of my long-winded talks to inspire them.  A number of girls laughed.  I asked why and they said it sounded like I copied my talk from Coach Demetrius Goins.  Demetrius, by the way, had flown to Chicago with his wife Kelly to help the Weibel girls as a number of them were presently his students. I had brought National Master and Women’s FIDE Master Uyanga Byambaa with us to inspire the girls and go over their games. 

Uyanga gave it her all.  Any time you walked into our team room you would see her analyzing some players game.  Ted Castro, of the NorCal House of Chess here in Fremont, stopped by our team room a number of times to cheer our girls on.  He had in the past coached a number of our girls while he taught at Weibel or as private students.  Back to my main thread—as the sixth and last round ended and two of our Under 10 girls won their games and the third took a draw, I was sure we had the fourth place trophy.  I was thrilled when we ended up in third place especially since we placed ahead of seven New York schools. Granted, two New York private schools, Dalton and Speyer Legacy place ahead of us.

Last, but far from least, was our dynamic, energetic and driven Under 8 Team (Erin Law, Yesun Lee and Chau-Ha Nghiem).   I had never expected that this team with two novices and only one experienced player, Erin Law, would ever be in first place.  Yet, through the first five rounds that is exactly where they were.  Yet, they reversed the direction of our Under 10 Team.  Each round the other teams pulled closer to us.  Before the sixth round started it still looked good for this dynamic trio.  All Weibel needed was two wins to take a clear first and one win from any of our three players to tie for first.  I guess their running around, hiding under the tables, and carrying each other around took its toll.  All three lost their games and we placed second to New York PS 139 the strongest of the New York public elementary schools.  Perhaps I should have ordered the parents to take their girls and make them nap after each round as one parent from another school in Fremont does with his daughter.  I guess that just isn’t in my nature.  As many of you know, I have only sons and grandsons so I guess I just couldn’t help myself enjoying these faux granddaughters of mine having fun.  Now all I am left with is the chess player’s lament, “I shoulda, I coulda, if I woulda.”

I would like to thank all the parents who took the weekend to join their daughters in Chicago.  Their support

was, as far as I am concerned, unmatched by any other group and accounted in a big way for the success of our girls.  I would like to thank NM Uyanga Byambaa for taking a weekend away from her studies to coach the girls in Chicago. While we were in Chicago she checked her e-mail and learned she had been accepted as a transfer student at U.C.L.A. I just read on Facebook that she also received acceptance to Berkeley.  As much as I think U.C.L.A. is a better school, I hope she selects Cal.  Perhaps she will then be able to continue teaching at Weibel. 

Another thank you goes to Rob Chan for his willingness to drive myself and Demetrius and Kelly Goins to the Baha’i Temple even though he had visited it once before.  I am sorry that on the way back from the Temple Demetrius did not get to taste a true Chicago deep dish pizza. The place we went to produced some thick crust thing they called deep dish.  As I told him, being from New York, deep dish isn’t really a pizza anyway because you can’t fold the slices in your hand, have the mozzarella cheese flow over the sides and get grease all over your clothes. 

Thanks to NM Uyanga Byambaa, WFM Alexandra Botez, IM Emory Tate, Lauren Goodkind and Elaine Veksler for giving up one of their Sundays to help train our girls.  Oh, and least I forget, many thanks to the parents who allowed us to use their homes for these training sessions. Kudos, once again, to the 14 Weibel girls who played so well in Chicago. 

That sounds like a good ending for my report, but I am never finished in boring you by writing too much.  I need to add a few personal experiences that warmed my soul.  The organizers of the championships gave me a bottle of wine because they were thrilled about the number of girls I brought from the far distant country of California.  I was thrilled, I told the organizers at a coaches meeting, to swipe an idea from their event to use at my own--a small box on each table for the players to place their turned off cellphones in during their games. 

As many of you know I love photography.  I consider myself a photojournalist – a street photographer.  In Chicago, in the past, I have taken many people shots and mixed them with photographs of the amazing architecture of the city.  This year I took a photo that is out of character for me, yet one I love--a night shot of part of the city and the waterfront from my 32nd floor window.  That alone could have topped off the success of the Weibel girls, but something even more moving occurred.  As I was sitting at the airport Monday morning, awaiting my flight and looking out at a dull raining day, I heard a voice say, “Aren’t you Professor Kirshner?”  I turned my head to see a young man.  He had just gotten off the plane we would be boarding.  He told me he got out of the line heading for the baggage area when he saw me as he wanted to tell me how much he had enjoyed my college class years back and how much I had inspired him to continue his education.  We talked for about five minutes.  As he left to catch his next flight the woman sitting next to me said, “That was a heart warming conversation.”  She continued, “I realize how thankless the teaching profession can be at times, but I am sure it is times like this that warm your soul.”  She was so right.
Chess is Forever,
Alan
MY PHOTOGRAPHS: http://www.CalNorthYouthChess.org/photographs.html