Pimlico Makes Championship Moves in Chess
During the weekend of March 22, Pimlico Elementary/Middle School beat more than 15 other teams to take the middle school title at the Maryland Stat
e Scholastic Chess Championships, the state's largest scholastic chess tournament held ever. “It’s a difficult game to learn,” says De’Aysa Bonner, a 7th-grader at Pimlico and one of 15 students on the middle school team, but she and her teammates have improved by leaps and bounds in a relatively short period of time.The Baltimore City Board of School Commissioners publicly congratulated the winning team, its coach, parents, supporters and school staff during the School Board meeting on April 28 (pictured).
Pimlico has been developing its tradition of excellence in chess since forming a team in 2005, but Aaron Clark, the team’s first coach, still remembers what it felt like to lose. “We suffered bad losses in our first tournaments,” Mr. Clark remembers. His 3rd-, 4th- and 5th-grade students were humiliated, and he’s not ashamed to admit that he was pretty upset himself.
Mr. Clark, then a 4th-grade math teacher and now Pimlico’s assistant principal, started the team, which is affiliated with the Baltimore Kids Chess League, at the insistence of Principal Orrester Shaw.
“I played a little bit of chess in college,” says Mr. Shaw, and he introduced it to his first students as a way of rewarding good behavior. “When I started teaching, I had a student in my class who was outstanding. To bribe the class, I would say that I would play Debbie [one of their classmates] a game of chess if they behaved.” And although Debbie and her elementary-school classmates were less than half his size, the match, Mr. Shaw says, could go either way. “It was the biggest thrill.”
To improve the young team and drum up interest in the game, Mr. Clark and Mr. Shaw used a similar tactic at Pimlico. They brought chessboards to the cafeteria and allowed students to play during lunch. “At practice, I would say, ‘Who’s going to challenge Mr. Shaw at lunch tomorrow?’” Mr. Clark says.
Their practice led to four tournament victories in the past two years alone.
Two years ago, after teacher Lee Rutledge heard that Pimlico won the elementary girls state championship, he specifically asked to be transferred to Pimlico. Impressed by the chess team’s drive and determination, he wanted to work with those students in the classroom. “I wanted to see how they were as English students and as middle-schoolers.” When Mr. Clark was promoted to assistant principal, Mr. Rutledge took over as coach.
The benefits of being a skilled chess player extend far beyond the game. Seventh-grader Kyallah Allen has been playing for four years now. “It helps you concentrate,” she says. “If you can win at chess, you can win at other things.”
Desire Thomas, also in the 7th grade, would definitely recommend the game to other students. “They’ll learn how to think more and understand strategies.” Now, she says, “When I play basketball, I think I need a strategy to get through people, and in chess you need a strategy to win.”
Not least of what the Pimlico chess champions have developed is confidence. A number of them can beat their coach on a pretty consistent basis, a fact that Mr. Rutledge doesn’t mind at all. “Chess gives them a real sense of identity about being good at something,” he says. That demand for excellence infects other students, even those who don’t play chess, and spills over into other areas of players’ lives. “The only kid I had who jumped from basic to advanced on the MSA,” Mr. Rutledge says, “was on the chess team.”
Chess looks like a tradition that is likely to continue for some time at Pimlico. The school recently started a separate after-school chess program for elementary students, and of the students on this year’s state championship team, Pimlico is likely to lose only one, Philander Alston. Philander is graduating from Pimlico and will attend Baltimore Polytechnic Institute next year.
--Lionel Foster
