national championship for youth teams

Saturday our team organised the national championship for youth teams. The idea is really clever. It is teams of four players; one for each age category. This means that the youngest player is about ten years of age and the oldest is younger than eighteen. The oldest always play on board number 1 and the youngest always plays on 4. We had 26 teams participating in a tournament of 10 Suisse rounds. This meant a whole lot of draughts players in one room. Probably the most our playing location has ever seen. All was organised in a pretty ad-hoc fashion. Our treasurer had managed to get €1000.- in funds through his work, but we hadn’t even had one meeting beforehand. On the day itself it was logical that we would appoint one head-arbiter and one competition leader. The others would be the hands-on arbiters that would be divided among the tables. I took tables 5, 6 and 7. It is surprising how everything just works almost all by itself. Before all this we had set up the tables. It fit perfectly, and there wouldn’t have been room for one table more. Afterwards we also had to place everything back the way we had found it. Being as I am without many muscles this meant much heavy lifting and I can still feel it. All the youths behaved perfectly well. Everyone knew the rules and set up the boards again after their games. They even knew how to operate the digital clocks. Another interesting thing is the amount of girls participating. At younger ages they still like to play draughts! It makes you think that it is crazy that we seniors are playing serious games with the excruciatingly slow tempo of 50 moves per two hours. Youth can be kept with more, and faster, games per day. It was a huge success.