Ministry of Information, Culture, Youth & Sports
Sporting Bodies Could Benefit From Chess – Federation President
KINGSTON(JIS):Sunday, December 14, 2008
President of the Jamaica Chess Federation (JCF), Attorney-at-Law Ian Wilkinson, has said that the game of chess should be an integral part of all national sporting bodies, as the athletes would benefit tremendously from exposure to the game.
“I keep advocating from the platform at the Federation, that all sporting disciplines in Jamaica should have chess as their backbone. All the national footballers should be taught chess, it would help to better decision making on the field,” Mr. Wilkinson told JIS News.
He opined that “if the West Indies cricketers were playing chess, they wouldn’t do so poorly when batting, because it would help them in selecting the strokes to play. It might sound farfetched but it’s true. When you learn to play chess, it helps you in your decision-making, because one bad decision on the chess board and you lose. So chess players tend to work hard not to make a bad decision.”
“When you put that discipline into netball, football, and cricket, the sky is the limit,” he added, noting that the discipline that one develops from chess, will serve them very well in life.
According to Mr. Wilkinson, such is the influence of chess on intellectual development that it is not a coincidence that most of the world’s developed countries play the game.
“In a lot of societies where chess is prevalent, for example countries like Norway and Switzerland, apart from their other sources of wealth, chess is one of the reasons why those places are so rich. The intellectual capacity of the people is very high, and one of the reasons for that is that a lot of them learn chess from an early age,” he pointed out.
Tomorrow, December 13, the Jamaica Chess Federation will host a public chess exhibition at the Half-Way-Tree Transportation Centre to expose the Jamaican public to the game. The exhibition will begin at noon.
Source: http://www.jis.gov.jm
Ian!!