Breaking Barriers Through the Game of Chess

My work with special needs started when there was a blind student who came to Hunter and wanted to be, you know, wanted to get better at chess. And I had no idea how to teach a blind player and and I learned very quickly and you know, you have special chess boards like the Braille board and so forth. You have indented squares and, and little points also to tell the difference between the white and the black pieces. But, no, he became so good.

He won the U.S. blind championship three times. He works for the State Department. And, I actually made him the captain of the high school team. And you know, he commanded everybody's attention. And, he was a great leader. So that was my first experience working with a particular disability. And then, I also worked with a student who was a quadriplegic, and he used to push the pieces with a stick he held in his mouth. And he got up to 2000. He graduated, college, then went to law school in Georgetown, graduated, worked as an attorney.

You know, his body just couldn't take it after a while. You know, he passed away a while ago, but he was very successful as an attorney as well. And he, you know, he was appreciative of what chess had given him. And, you know, he he left in his will. He left money to the U.S. chess trust is considerable amount. But you know, what it showed me is that no disability disqualifies you from playing. And and I think that, this is, this is a very important, very important lesson.

And we should not rule out people especially say, for example, autistic kids or autistic adults. You know, we now have a relationship with the Dan Marino Foundation. And, Dan Marino created that foundation because one of his sons is autistic. I actually flew down to Florida. And you know, spend some time with them to see the kind of work that he does. And, it's very, you know, very inspiring. And, you know, chess has its share of autistic players, do you know, to, to verify, to one degree or another and, and, and I think that, they are very high functioning and they can do extremely well.

So why not give them something? They are not going to succeed on a ball field, you know, necessarily. So why not give them something they could succeed at and and I think that, that we have to be more proactive in making opportunities available to, people with disabilities. I was actually just, thinking about that and having that conversation with the school program that I run, because I know it's a fairly high percentage of our students are autistic, and I think it provides them an outcome that they don't get, say, with the indoor recess where it's loud and chaotic.

And so I think there's a lot of self-selection into the program of kids that just realized that this was a better space for them just in their school day. So I just, I thought it was an interesting observation.