Check out Wakulla chess kids
By Kathleen Laufenberg • DEMOCRAT STAFF WRITER • May 25, 2009
Every Tuesday this school year, 40 elementary- and middle-school kids spilled into the cafeteria at Riversprings Middle School in Crawfordville. They came to do battle, chess-style.
“I like that it teaches you strategy,” Mitchell Atkinson, 12, said of the after-school chess-club meetings. “It’s helped me think in new ways.”
The young Wakulla chess players — 30 are in elementary school, the rest are middle-schoolers who act as mentors — have gotten so good that they were asked to compete at a prestigious smack down: the Florida Invitational Super Stars Chess Tournament. About a dozen club members went to the competitions in Palm Beach Gardens earlier this month — and their South Florida showing made their supporters proud.
“Overall, we were sixth place for Riversprings Middle School, just outside getting a trophy, and we were eighth for our Shadeville Elementary School team,” said Jennifer Briggs, a parent of two chess players and one of the club’s founders. “The experience was invaluable. These boys and girls definitely saw what tournament chess is like. There was chess going on everywhere.”
Read more about the Wakulla County chess team Tuesday in the Families section of Tallahassee Democrat.
Source: http://www.tallahassee.com
Very cool.