Chess champ spreads her passion for the game
Published On Sun Oct 24 2010
Dan Robson
Staff Reporter
Yuanling Yuan is a relentless chess champion.
The precocious 16-year-old from Victoria Park Collegiate Institute recently spent a couple weeks in Russia as a member of Canada’s team at the World Chess Olympiad.
She ranked 27th out of 564 female players — the highest a Canadian has ever finished. And when she’s not busy being a remarkable chess whiz on the board, she’s busy championing the game off of it.
In today’s digital world, chess may as well be lawn-bowling to many young people. At least that’s what some people think.
Yuan, however, is set on proving those people wrong.
Two years ago she founded Chess in the Library — a smart-sounding club for smart-sounding people. The kind of people who travel to the library (that ancient bastion of knowledge) to play chess (that game that old, wise people play).
“I just wanted to do something to promote chess in Canada,” she said of the day in spring 2009 when she walked into Brookbank Library and told head librarian Denise Drabkin that she wanted to start a chess club.
“She came in here and she said, ‘Hi! I’m really, really keen on starting a chess in the library program’ and I said ‘Wow, lets talk,’ ” recalls Drabkin, who admits she was skeptical at first. “The rest is history.”
Less than two years in, Yuan’s idea has turned into a weekly ritual for people young and old across Toronto. Chess in the Library now operates in 12 Toronto libraries, and has more than 40 volunteers.
The program also operates in a library in Ottawa, and recently expanded to a library in Victoria B.C.
Each library has between 20 to 30 participants coming to learn and play chess every week — that’s more than 250 people.
Here is the full article.
This is good.