Three times a week, passionate chess players met in classrooms to play chess with one another. This was not the case for the previous two years, when club meetings usually happened about two weeks apart. After the leadership positions became open last year due to seniors leaving Rocklin High School (RHS), sophomore Shray Bagga became the club president.
Bagga said that in the past, the club never had tournaments and that club meetings often consisted of people not playing chess. According to him, “[People] didn’t do anything” during last year, when he joined.
This year, Bagga invested “about seven hours a week” to improve the club, saying, “My only goal with these seven hours is to make sure that chess club can either get more members, start more tournaments, and overall, just be a better club.”
I invest about seven hours a week to improve the chess club.
– Shray Bagga
Junior Ari Raffs joined the chess club last year, but the inactivity led him to skip going “half of the year.” Nevertheless, he still enjoyed casual play, but said “a couple of tournaments would have been fun.”
The thing that members wanted most from the chess club was tournaments, which had been lacking in previous years. According to senior Anderson Wang, one major way the chess club “could have improved is by having more organized tournaments.”
“Some people like myself would prefer more [tournaments] to bring out that competitive side of chess club,” Wang said.
The only organized matches in the chess club for the past two years were against Granite Bay High School (GBHS). Raffs did not join because he would have had to “schedule a game” by himself and another GBHS student. Instead of a match against another school, Raffs preferred a tournament only among RHS students, where everything could be more controlled.
This year, Bagga and the rest of the board members planned to have many tournaments, with a few being against other schools. “We can take on other high schools around us, and hopefully RHS can be the first chess club to host a multi-school tournament,” he said. This revelation excited many club members, including Raffs and Wang.
Wang looked forward to tournaments and more organized matches. “I like to consider myself a good chess player … I’d like to prove it with matches and tournaments,” he said.
Some members joined the chess club only for casual play, like Raffs. However, he said that he “might want to participate in a tournament” this year. “Also, [the board members said] I can get medals, which sounds fun,” he said.
Free chess lessons for anyone
The chess club secretary is designing free chess lessons for any skill level. In order to do so, he creates a master document filled with lesson topics and the puzzles for the club coaches to use.
The secretary, vice president, and treasurer use a third-party website to build the puzzles for lessons. The finished puzzles get uploaded to a chess club website where learners can solve them.
