How Can You Reach Chess For Juniors?

We'd Love to Hear From You

Most messages reach us by email. That's the honest truth, and we prefer it that way because a written note gives us room to answer carefully instead of rushing through a phone call between lessons.

Write to our director, Sarah Whitman, at [email protected]. She reads everything that comes in, and she answers the bulk of it personally.

You don't need a polished pitch. A few sentences about who you are and what you're after is plenty for us to point you in the right direction.

Asking Questions About Our Programs

Parents tend to arrive with the same handful of worries. Will my younger child sit still? My kid already beats me — is this too basic? We've been running scholastic groups long enough to take those questions seriously rather than wave them away.

Before you write, it helps to skim a couple of pages. Our camps and programs overview lays out age bands and session formats, and the chess fundamentals material shows the actual progression we teach.

If you've read those and still aren't sure where a child fits, say so. Describe their experience in plain terms — "knows how the pieces move, loses interest after a short stretch" tells us more than a rating ever could.

Sharing Feedback on Our Instruction Materials

Coaches and teachers use our worksheets and lesson sequences in classrooms we never see. That gap is exactly why your feedback matters to us.

When a puzzle set confuses a class, or a tactic sheet lands perfectly with second-graders, we want the specifics. Which sheet. Which grade. What happened in the room.

We revise materials on an ongoing basis, and a fair number of those revisions started as an email from someone who taught the lesson and noticed a problem we'd missed. Our instruction methods page reflects that slow accumulation of classroom notes.

Send corrections too. A mislabeled diagram or a typo in a notation example is worth flagging, however small it seems.

For Prospective Researchers and PhD Students

A steady stream of graduate students writes asking whether they can study what we do. The short answer is often yes, with caveats worth naming up front.

What we can offer

We work with cohorts of young players across a range of ages and skill levels, which makes our setting useful for questions about cognitive development, pattern learning, and how children build expertise over time. Researchers studying scholastic education have found that authentic classroom data is hard to come by, and we're open to careful collaboration.

What we ask in return

Any work involving children runs through consent procedures and ethics review on your end before we begin. We won't shortcut that. We also ask that you share findings with us in a form we can actually use with families and coaches, not only a journal article behind a paywall.

If that fits your project, write with a paragraph on your research question and your institution. The fit becomes clear quickly once we see the shape of what you're proposing.

Collaboration and Partnership Opportunities

Partnerships take a few forms here. Schools want to fold chess into an existing curriculum. Other clubs want to share materials. Conference organizers invite us to present what we've learned at our teachers conference.

We say yes to collaborations that put more children in front of a board with a thoughtful coach. We say no, politely, to arrangements that are mostly about logos and marketing.

The distinction isn't always obvious from the outside, so describe the actual work you have in mind. Who does what, who benefits, what gets built. That framing tells us far more than a partnership title would.

Some of our longest-running relationships began as a single shared workshop and grew from there. We'd rather start small and prove the fit than sign something elaborate on day one.

Arranging a Visit to Our Teaching Space

You can visit. We host prospective families, visiting coaches, and the occasional researcher who needs to see a session before designing a study.

Visits run during scheduled lessons, because a quiet empty room tells you nothing about how the place works. The trade-off is that we keep visitor numbers low per session so the children aren't distracted by a row of adults at the back.

Email ahead. We'll find a session that matches what you want to observe — a beginner group plays very differently from a tournament-prep cohort, and you'll want to watch the right one.

Who Reads Your Message

Sarah Whitman, our director, reads incoming mail first and routes anything technical to the coach or author best placed to answer. There's no ticketing system and no chatbot in the way.

This means replies carry a person's name and a real opinion. It also means a complex question may sit a day or two while the right person finds time to write a proper response between lessons.

We think that's a fair trade. You can read more about the people behind the program on our About Chess For Juniors page.

What to Expect (and What We Can't Help With)

Expect a reply within a few working days for most messages. Program questions and material feedback tend to move fastest. Research and partnership inquiries take longer because we read them carefully and often discuss them as a group.

A few things we can't do. We don't offer one-on-one online coaching outside our programs, we don't share student data or contact details with outside organizations, and we can't evaluate a child's rating potential from a single email.

For how we handle the information you send us, see our Privacy Policy. Our Terms of Use covers the materials we publish.

If you're still unsure whether your question fits, send it anyway. Pointing people to a better resource is part of the job, and we'd rather do that than leave a good question unanswered.