A Look at the Rooks!

Medal winning Brooklyn Rooks!

PS 39 salutes our own Brooklyn Rooks, the amazing chess team that has been making all the right moves both at home and city-wide. The team (as well as its connected after school club) has what it takes to master the most complicated of games.  Within the last few weeks, the Rooks placed first in the Under 600 division of New York City’s Right Move chess tournament!

Victors include Jordan Fisher, Asher Kalfus, Finn Kleckner, Henry Monroe, Sullivan O'Connor, Milo Poniewozik, Jeremy Rodriguez, Sergio Rodriguez, Hugo Scully, and Evan Sherman.

Here, we talk to beloved Rooks coach Oscar Santana, as well as parent coordinators Bree O’ Connor, Peter Sherman and Beth Kleber. They tell us how chess has enhanced the lives of their kids, as well as the challenge of the game and the rewards it brings.

Oscar
I was in the seventh grade when I first learned how to play. I used to like sports, but I had a hip condition, so I couldn’t play sports anymore. So I found chess. I just started playing it in the seventh grade, and I wasn’t too good. In eighth grade, it started picking up for me. When high school hit, that’s when I became much better.

Chess just keeps challenging me. I love playing the game, but teaching it is so much more rewarding. I love to see the kids’ eyes light up when they figure it out, when they’re learning a complicated game like this. It’s nice to see how happy they get.

Obviously, young children have different attention spans. Each child moves at a different pace, so you have all these different levels all around you. But I want to keep all of them involved and engaged. It’s not so much about how much I’m going to teach them. It’s about how I have to keep them engaged.
You can always spot a good chess player. You see the spark. And then as you teach them, they are like a sponge. They absorb it all.

You should definitely study, but the most important thing is to play. Play as much as you can. It’s nice to have group lessons, but if you can get a private teacher, you learn so much. But play a lot. You need to play.

The Brooklyn Rooks’ parents are just so encouraging, so involved. There are also a great bunch of kids. Fortunately, we have no crying on the team. They get beat up and they keep going. Even when I’m teaching, I still try to play in a few tournaments throughout the year. I love playing.

There will be a lot of players from the club who will be joining the team. We definitely want to try to keep expanding. There is a high volume of kids who want to come in and play. We’re short on space. They’re going to be playing in the nationals this year. Hopefully we can have a good performance out there. They played in the city this year and scored fourth place. They definitely did an awesome job, these guys.

Bree
My son, Sullivan, is in the fourth grade. He loves it. The tournaments are long and grueling, but he just is having a blast. It’s really fun to watch the kids. They’re really engaged and excited about chess and they get into really strategic arguments with one another. It’s just really fun to see how much they’re really into it.

The team has been doing just a bang-up job at all of these tournaments. I mean, we go normally once a month. However, they’ve had two or three tournaments in the last four weeks.We did the city-wide championship a couple of weeks ago. Our team placed fourth in the Under 600. Last week, at The Right Move tournament, they placed first.

I help coordinate with Beth and Peter. We help get information out to the parents, to make sure everybody’s in the loop about the tournaments. We’re working on a fund-raising campaign because we want to be able to help the families out who are committed to going to the nationals in Dallas in May. We’ll be kicking off some efforts in the next month or so. I don’t have the exact date, but I believe in March we are going to have a chess night in conjunction with the PTA meeting.

We’re going to be looking for community sponsors, business sponsors for the team. We’ll be selling T-shirts. Little bits of chess swag in the coming months to help support the team.

Generally, the tournaments in Manhattan start playing at ten in the morning and the last game usually ends around 3: 30 or 4. Then we stay for the award ceremonies, because somebody is always thinking up a medal or something and the whole team is usually placing. So it’s a long day. At the city-wide tournament, we didn’t leave until almost eight o’ clock at night. We started to play at ten that morning. So this is a dedicated group of kids.

Every class, from first grade on up, gets chess instruction for most of the year, and for several months out of the year.What’s great about it is that we just have a culture of chess in the school. Studies have shown that there is such a correlation in improvement in all academic areas, from reading to math to geometric understanding, and understanding special relationships and planning. It’s really quite extraordinary. It’s amazing what chess can do, and it’s exciting that it is such a part of the culture at 39.

Oscar is a great teacher. He’s great with the kids. He’s a totally affable person. His love of the game rubs off on the kids like you wouldn’t believe.

Peter
I’m connected through my son, Evan, who is in the fourth grade. He started in the chess club in second grade. Last year, he moved over to the team. The team competes at these tournaments which are usually monthly and sometimes a little bit more. It’s been really nice for him.

I think the main thing he likes is that it’s competitive. He likes the aspect of competing and doing well. He definitely has a mathematical mind, which must figure into it somehow, because I don’t. He has a good mind for memorization, the strategy of it. And that’s an important part of chess, unlike the way I would play it as a kid where I never got any real instruction. I just sort of knew how the pieces moved and I was always trying to keep track of where things were. But they learn the strategies and what are called the “opens.” You learn to see the board in a certain way and you learn how to get checkmate in two or three moves or whatever it might be. So it’s almost like learning plays in basketball. You really have to study them and memorize them. I think it appeals to that aspect of his mind. You study these things and you commit them to memory.

There is this visual/’in the moment’ kind of thing where you can see several moves ahead. That comes with more time and practice. That’s the area where a lot of them are still developing their game. They’ve been doing pretty well. There is this team camaraderie that really appeals to him too.

Oscar has been fantastic. He is a product of the ‘chess in the schools’ program, which we used to have officially through the city. Once the Title One funding was lost, that was no longer something that the city would pay for. The PTA came together and agreed to finance it and to bring Oscar in to do this. Hehad gone to both a junior high and high school that had a chess curriculum. That’s how he developed in the game. And he had great instruction.

He’s really adept at getting through to the kids. That appeals to me when I see it. There are a lot of different coaching styles, and his style is very easygoing. Some of those other coaches are very intense. With this particular group, I think it really works with them. He’s soft spoken but he’s in control of the situation. He has a way with them. It’s something that I think probably just comes naturally to him.

There is a time commitment to going to the tournament, and you have to sit all day in the high school cafeteria on a Sunday. In the winter it’s not so bad, but when the weather gets nice, it’s a little bit [difficult], yet you see how much enjoyment the kids get out of it.

There is this contingent of boys who are now in the fourth grade. The team is heavily male. There is only one girl who is officially on the team. In general, when you go to these tournaments, you can see that there are not many girls. It’s definitely an issue that they had worked at some level to address, but it’s still a male-dominated situation. But for any parent who does have a daughter who is interested in it or shows some ability at it, I would still recommend that they give it a shot.

Even though there are a lot of boys, the environment is kept calmer by Oscar’s demeanor, if that makes a difference to some girls. I would recommend it to any kid who has an interest in it. It’s the only team that the school has. Most elementary schools don’t have teams of any kind, really. It’s been good for all the parents who have been involved too because it’s another way to build the community within the school.

Solo it would have been a lot to do, but because [the three of us parents] are all able to do it together, and all of our sons are the same age and all play together these three years, it’s really helped. We have camaraderie as we sit through these long days of tournaments.

Beth
I have two kids at 39. I have a fourth grader and a first grader, Milo [fourth grade] and Andre [first grade]. The school always had a really great reputation for having this really great chess program, which I think was a hangover from when the school was a Title One school. So there was always this chess instruction that was available to the kids during the day.

Because Milo was getting chess in his classroom, he started getting interested in it. He joined the club as soon as he could, when he was in second grade. Last year he started on the team. Then they needed some [parents] to take over the chess program and I have a hard time saying no.

I’m a lousy chess player. My kids have tried to teach me many times. My husband plays chess. I think it’s really great for analytical thinking, patience and a lot of things that don’t necessarily come easily to a young child. I think it’s a fascinating exercise, particularly in tournaments where the kids get revved up and excited.

The way you can do really well in a tournament is to outlast your opponent, to be smart and take your time. I think that’s one thing that Oscar really stresses with them, particularly as the day goes on. Make the game go as long as you possibly can, which is not easy for an eight-year-old or a nine –year-old.
It teaches them thinking ahead, planning out your moves, this kind of three dimensional thinking, the relationship between things.

Oscar is great. He played on a really competitive chess team when he was in school. He’s a young guy, easygoing and kind. The kids love him. He’s really supportive.

Honestly, it’s a great activity in the winter. They like it. They love to win. They can see that they’ve gotten better and they see their individual rankings increase as they win more games. I think there is a lot of satisfaction that they get out of it. They get to hang out with their friends. They are really tight. It’s a nice little group. They’re all buddies.

Particularly in second or third grade, I think that’s when kids are really ready to understand the game, and get something out of it. It’s a great benefit.

-By Ronald Sklar, Reporter at Large