York College chess team wins two matches at national final less than a year after being formed
York College & University Centre chess team defied their underdog status to win two of their matches at the English Schools’ Chess Championships.
The Sim Balk Lane students, who only started playing together last October, triumphed over St Paul’s School in London and Bristol Grammar School Sixth Form during the national final that was held over two days at the University of Nottingham’s King’s Meadow campus.
A field of 351 teams that had entered this year’s competition was trimmed down to 30 for the prestigious final with York College proud to have qualified by virtue of being crowned 2024/25 champions of York and, then, Yorkshire.
Our team inflicted the only defeat of the tournament on St Paul’s – the UK’s top-performing private school in terms of exam results – with fee-paying institutions forming almost two-thirds of the finalists, including the likes of Eton College, Westminster School, King’s College School (Wimbledon), Harrow School and Winchester College.
Hampton School emerged as winners and boasted an International Master – the second-highest title that can be bestowed upon a player after Grandmaster – among their ranks in Rajat Makar.
He was not the only International Master competing either with Yichen Han, of Oxford’s Magdalen College School, also present.
Despite such esteemed opposition, our team of Halen Harrison, Koby Dickson, Noah Helme, Tatenda Midzi, Peter Foster, Charlie Arey and Elliot Murray succeeded in improving on their pre-tournament ranking of 29th to finish 26th.
That achievement is all the more impressive when considering two key players that helped the team win the Regional Final – international students Magnus Lavergren and Eli Neuberg – were unable to feature having returned to Norway three days prior to the prestigious competition.
York College & University Centre Student Progress Leader Alex Godfrey launched the chess enrichment club 10 months ago and they meet up on Campus once or twice a week.
On their achievements, he said: “An International Master has a chess ranking of over 2400 points and our highest-ranked player has 1700 points but, despite the odds stacked against us, we improved our ranking from 29th to 26th and, what makes everything the chess team has achieved this year even more impressive, is that they are all Year 12 students who can compete again next year.”
The students’ maiden competition together, just a month after being formed, saw them create history when they become the first team other than Fulford School to win the York Interschools Secondary School Year 12/13 competition.
Following that triumph at Bootham School, they defeated Mercia School from Sheffield 5-1 to clinch the Yorkshire Under-19 Schools title, having earlier vanquished Darlington-based hosts Queen Elizabeth Sixth Form College 5.5-0.5.
