USCF Mission / Chessplayers with disabilities
that a real sport, or a mainstream sport, would have,” said Michael Aigner, a USCF life master who’s also coached two World Youth champions (Daniel Naroditsky and Steven Zierk), two champions of domestic tournaments and the serially successful Saratoga High School chess team. Aigner was born with shortened arms and legs and uses a
wheelchair to get around. He loves watching baseball, football and basketball and unlike many serious tournament players, Aigner didn’t develop a serious interest in chess until college, when he joined the chess club at the University of California at Davis. (See sidebar, “Aigner Over the board.”) Aigner was active in tournaments in northern California and
Nevada, but a recent illness has limited his ability to participate in tournament play. However, he still plays online—which he
The U.S. Blind Chess Championships draw about 10 people
per year, though Alverson said numbers were higher in the mid- 1980s when the Finley, Ohio, Lions Club sponsored the event—despite the fact that Finley, Ohio is a little tougher to get to than other places. Participants had to fly into Toledo or Detroit and then find a
way to get to Finley, and Alverson said her father—who traveled with her to numerous blind and sighted chess tournaments when he was still alive—often drove people to and from the airport so they could participate in the tournament. “My dad did an awful lot for those chess players. Sometimes
I think my dad was unappreciated. He helped out quite a bit, went to the tournaments as often as he could,” Alverson said. Now that he’s gone, she relies on public transportation to get
Top left: Ata Alp Süren of southern California; top right, Nicholas Brennan of Atantic City, New Jersey; bottom right, Jerry Pattee of Portland, Oregon.
started doing in the mid-1990s—and administers an online chess club. Like Aigner and Santoyo, Ginny Alverson grew up loving
sports—she’d listen to baseball games on a transistor radio during family road trips as a kid, and worked for many years in sports broad casting—but was born blind, so the sport she took up was chess. “Mom and Dad encouraged me to do things. That isn’t always
true for kids with disabilities, especially blind kids,” Alverson said. Alverson’s father taught her to play when she was about eight years old, and started a chess club while attending Sullivan Central High School in Blountville, Tennessee, in the mid-1970s. She didn’t start playing in tournaments until the mid-1980s,
when she learned that there were tournaments for blind people and started participating in the U.S. Blind Championships.
32 July 2013 | Chess Life
to tournaments. Now the U.S. Blind Championship takes place in Pittsburgh, and Alverson travels there on Amtrak trains with her guide dog, a chocolate Labrador retriever named Elijah, and stays with an aunt and uncle who live in the city. She used to fly to tournaments, but has developed a distaste
for air travel, partly due to increased Transportation Security Administration restrictions and partly due to problems with the airlines themselves, which have left her high and dry on a couple of occasions. Once, traveling with a prior guide dog, she checked the bag that contained his food, and as luck would have it, that bag ended up at the wrong airport. Airline staff apologized and found the dog another bag of food, but Alverson was none too pleased. “Now when I go to tournaments the first thing I do is see if Amtrak’s going. I will not deal with the hassles,” Alverson said.
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