CHANGING THE FORMAT IN INTER SCHOOLS?

This year's National Inter-Schools is slated to begin 31 August - 1 September. As usual, going by statistics over the last 3 years:

BOYS U14
		TEAMS	SCHOOLS	PLAYERS
	2010	18	15	90
	2011	13	10	65
	2012	12	9	54

SEC OPEN
	2010	31	25	149
	2011	29	18	136
	2012	30	24	146

OPEN	2010	16	10	73
	2011	10	8	48
	2012	12	8	55

Note that the Secondary Open section is combined with the Girls U16 category, otherwise the numbers will drop if we are to measure only boy's participation. I am sure the number of ladies playing in secondary school has dropped but will need to work out the statistics at another post.

The trend that fewer schoolchildren engage in chess for school competition after they turn 16 years of age shows a gradual erosion of interest (seen from the number of players still playing in the Open). This could also be due to the fact that some schools may have closed their chess clubs since 2010, notably ACS Barker, SJI amongst the top schools. Others may have closed their chess clubs but we'll need some sleuthing from visiting MOE websites of these schools to find out.

My point is that this is a worrying trend for chess development in Singapore, especially if we detect erosion of interest in the Secondary Schools where the budding talents from the Primary Schools wither owing to the dominance of the top 3 ( RI, ACI, HCI) and leave little to the rest of the participating schools to garner any meaningful titles. We urgently need a relook of the current format of awarding accolades to help the schools that participate but do not win anything annually. Create 2 leagues perhaps (much like the EPL) so that the weaker schools can also emerge tops in their own league? Change the structure so that each school is represented not by age-group but have them represented as a collective team from U14-U16 (total of 10 players a team)? This will eliminate the favourites from having amassed a huge pool of talent from 1 bumper year of new students and also allows those schools which do not have enough students in the age-group category to compete.

Whatever the solution, I urge the newly formed EXCO to seriously deliberate on this issue as the erosion will negate much of their presents efforts in trying to sustain growth in numbers of schoolchildren after they leave their primary schools.

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