A Historic Weekend at Nationals
From September, we had this past weekend marked on our calendars - the National Elementary Chess Championships in Columbus, Ohio. The culmination of a year's worth of training, preparation, and hard work, the Championships represent the biggest stage for elementary chess competition in the United States. On this stage, our teams did not just succeed - they produced program-defining, historic results across the board, returning to NYC with not one, not two, but THREE national team championships and an individual national championship.
In the K-1 Championship section, Lower Lab backed up their championship performance in Saratoga, walking away as national champions, anchored by two 5.0 point performances from Max Kane and Scarlett Kong and secured by strong showings from Ethan Kim, Avery Goodrich, and Alexander Danford!
The Lower Lab team of Elliott Goodrich, Devin Wang, Takki Tanaka, and Shiv Dubey emerged victorious in the K-3 Championship section, highlighted by Elliott winning the individual K-3 National Championship! We have been proudly watching Elliott's chess journey and development over the last few years and could not imagine a more fitting student to be crowned the first individual national champion in ICN history.
Congratulations to the Lions on an amazing weekend!
In the K-5 U-900 section, PS 130K brought the national championship back to The Parkside! Leo Fleischauer led the way with an epic 6.0 point peformance (seventh-place individually), with Alvin Butler, Daniel Nachumi, Hunter Zelznick, Isaac Busidan, and Carlin Brooks all turning in incredible efforts as well to secure the victory for the Brooklyn Lions.
Here's a photo of a very proud Principal Parsons with the championship trophy back in Brooklyn this morning!
We also would like to give a special shout-out to the PS130M Dragons, who competed in their first ever National Championship! The Dragons drove over 500 miles and over 9 hours from Manhattan to Columbus to compete in the championships, and their efforts did not go unrewarded. The team secured a third-place finish in the K-6 Under 1000 section, including a seventh-place individual finish by Adorabella Zhu.
This weekend, we truly redefined the bar for excellence at ICN. We want to say a huge thank you to the families who committed their time and energy to making the trip to Columbus and supporting all of our students throughout the weekend. We also would like to recognize Coaches Ian, Logan, Angel, Jenny, Alexis, and David for their efforts, delivering pre-round pep talks, conducting post-round game analysis, and helping our players successfully navigate the high and lows of elite tournament competition. Lastly, we want to recognize all our coaches who were not in Columbus but worked tirelessly throughout the year at afterschool programs and camps to enable this success!
Clearly, we have a lot to celebrate this year, and with that in mind, we are excited to announce our first-ever ICN end-of-year Chess Festival!
The full-day festival will be a unique event to put an exclamation point on an amazing year of chess, which included our return to in-person programming after an extended hiatus during the pandemic, the launch of multiple new programs and the addition of hundreds of new families and students into the ICN family, and championships in Orlando, Saratoga, and Columbus. The festival will feature team-centric competitions, end-of-year awards, special contests, art, and much more. This is a once-a-year event not to be missed, and we hope to see many of you there! You can register using the links below:
Thanks,
Coach West
