This weekend the IHSA team championships were held in Peoria, IL, and were attended by 118 teams and over 1000 players. As a side note, the "record breaking" scholastics in NY which were featured on the front page of the USCF site only had 820 players.
From the accounts I have heard, several things were made clear. It was a wonderfully run event run by Mike Zacate, Chris Merli, Walter Brown, and Garrett Scott among others. Complete results can be found on the http://www.ihsa.org/ website.
Among the notable results, Stevenson HS of Lincolnshire was the surprise winner and the only undefeated team. The Stevenson program will likely be a strong team for the forseeable future due to the efforts of Dave Monatelli and Ken Wallach who are teaching at feeder schools to Stevenson.
Frankie Swindell became the first player in recent memory to win the top board prize in back to back years.
EDIT: Ironically the aforementioned Ken Wallach also won the top board prize playing for Stevenson in back to back years. We won't embarrass Ken by discussing which years that was.
Cary HS had a remarkable run beating 3 top 10 teams on a way to 5-2 result. In other reportings of the event much of the credit for Cary's success has gone to GM Yuri Shulman, who also has done great work with Barrington HS (another top 10 finisher). And while Yuri has helped the Cary program, to me the success of the program is due to Peter Spizzari, who has opened his home to studies and tirelessly brought this team to National eventsto prepare them.
People looking at the results may have noticed quite a few 10 point penalties that were assessed, these were by and large the result of cell phones going of by the players (or in some cases coaches).
There are also a couple of good threads on this event on the ICA forum http://www.ilchess.org/icaforum/view_forum.php?id=4
Apparently, there was a Monster truck rally going on at the same location making for one of the more bizarre combinations of site sharing I have seen with a chess tournament. Other strange events to be located at the same hotel or convention center with a tournament have been Body building championships (at one of the Atlanta Nationals), High Caliber Gun Show (K-12 in houston), Midwest Polka Festival (US Open '89), Star Trek Convention (quite a few players attending both events US Open '94).
I may comment on some of the points made in Vince Hart's posts on the ICA forum later.
Glenn
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Peter Spizzari credited strong parental support as one of the factors in Cary-Grove's success. I mentioned to him that I had spoken to a Cary-Grove player's mother at Tim Just's tournament last month and asked him if he knew who it was. He told me that it could have been any one of a half-dozen or more.
Hello Glen, I was wondering if you could list me as:
Getting to 2000
instead of Ivan's Blog
Thank you
Ivan
Vince,
Peter has done a wonderful job activating the parents in his program.
I enjoyed reading your comments about "whiny chess coaches". Most chess coaches are tremendous individuals that give so much more of their time then is expected
Having said that, there are occasionally some coaches that behave badly. To complain because some team has a GM that they bring in? Different coaches are at different playing levels. Should we mandate that all coaches need to have a rating firmly at 1500 so it is fair for all teams?
As far as the preparing for other teams complaint goes, that is silly. There are some teams that bring several alternates to state, and have the alternates go to the matches of teams they are expecting to face and simply copy the games to notation as an advance scouting report. It happens and there is nothing wrong with it.
I should have been more clear about the fact that the overwhelming majority of coaches that I have encountered have demonstrated exemplary sportsmanship. However, many, if most, are not experienced tournament players themselves so they don't always recognize the triviality of the whiners' complaints. I think The desire of the majority to be fair somtimes leads to the whiners' complaints gaining a lot more traction than they ever deserve.
Vince,
I agree completely about your point about inexperienced coaches.
The first time I directed at state, I was a rather inexperienced TD and came across the following situation:
Final round, two teams playing that were also rans (either 2-4 or 3-3), and the top boards for each school just needed a 1/2 point to qualify for individual state. It was very obvious that both players wanted a draw, both coaches would be happy with a draw.
After 12 moves, the players raised their hands and asked if they could agree to a draw. The IHSA rule was that players had to play 15 moves or get a TD's discretionary ruling. Since it was obvious what was going on, instead of saying "play 3 more moves" I used my discretion to allow the draw. What happened next was unbelievable to me.
The coach of the match taking place at the next table filed an appeal of my ruling! I thought he was kidding at first. I asked him why, and he told me that it could affect their placing on tiebreaks.
Even more frightening was the floor chief overturning my decision and giving the players a double forfeit, in what may be the worst appeals ruling ever. So, an inexperienced coach, and a terrible director ruined the one feel good story for two teams. As a TD I felt horrible, because the players did exactly as they should have, and were forfeited as a result. The appeals ruling was insane because when ruling on an appeal, you should not rule if this was the decision that you would have made. The question that an appeals ruling decides is "Was the TD within the rules making the decision that he or she did?"
Glenn
That is stunning. It seems pretty clear that the rules gave you discretion to permit them to agree to agree to a draw. Even so, shouldn't overruling you simply have led to the denial of permission and continuation of the game? I would ask you what the reason was for the double forfeit, but "reason" does not seem to have much to do with it.
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