When he quit after eight contentious years as president of the T&T Chess Association, Eddison Raphael knew he would have to pursue his vision for the sport elsewhere.
He finally accepted the fact that there were limits to his leadership among a group more concerned with their own personal interests than with efforts to advance the sport as a whole. "I couldn't bring the Association on the growth path that I wanted," he told DR in a recent interview. "At the time, club chess was on the wane, so I wanted the Association to set up chess centres throughout the country, hopefully to create a base of players from which we may be able to produce masters."
"The idea, in any case, was to focus on our resources for developing the sport," Raphael said. "Instead, members were more interested in going on trips abroad than with anything else."
In the 14 years since he left the Association, Raphael sees little or no tangible improvement in the general standard of the sport. "If we take our performance at the Olympiad as a measure, then our stagnation becomes quite clear. In fact, our results at Tromso this year, particularly by our men players, are among the poorest ever. And the sad thing about it is that the majority of our team members are virtual veterans of this premier tournament, some having played as many as four or five times. So, even now, where is the sport really going?"
In 2008 Raphael launched the T&T Chess Foundation, not to compete with the Association's agenda, but rather to promote the game among the country's young people for its well established benefits. "The object of the enterprise," he said, "is to use chess as an education tool to enhance academic performance and improve critical thinking skills." Essentially, he sees the Foundation as an investment in the nation's youth and, ultimately, its future.
"The capacity of this popular mind game to promote these objectives has been well demonstrated by experts and educationists in different parts of the world," he noted. "And this fact has been well supported by our experience at the Foundation where, over the years, many of our top trainees have excelled in their academic pursuits, some even winning scholarships."
In fulfilling its mission, the Foundation conducts a varied programme of activity, including free training classes for members of the public, organising junior tournaments with the now popular Caribbean Chess Carnival as its centre piece, initiating a promising chess-in-schools programme in Tobago and conducting a breakthrough community outreach programme.
Since 2008, dozens of youngsters, several accompanied by their parents, have graduated from the Foundation's free Sunday morning training classes at the National Library in Port-of-Spain. In addition more than 300 have benefited from similar training sessions held in San Fernando, Arima and Tobago. This facility, the only one of its kind in the country, provides unmistakable testimony to the Foundation's conviction about the value of chess in the building of a mentally healthy society. Many of the beginners emerging from these classes go on to enter the tournament arena as novices.
The Caribbean Chess Carnival also stands as a unique product of the Foundation, it being the only annual tournament attracting players to our country from other parts of the region, thus serving as another valuable unifying sporting event.
The chess-in-schools programme in Tobago, launched as the Rhand Scholastic Chess Challenge, has led to an enthusiastic revival of the sport in the sister isle.
Students of eight secondary schools are its beneficiaries and prospective members of the Tobago Chess Club now being formed under the guidance of Vaugn Laptiste, Branch Manager of Rhand Credit Union and veteran chessist.
Another vigorous "child" of the revival was the first open tournament in Tobago held last July at the Light and Life Pentecostal High School In Scarborough.
The Foundation also makes history with its Community Outreach Programme in partnership with the Diego Martin Regional Corporation. The programme had an impressive start earlier this year at the Carenage Community Centre where chess has now joined the list of sports actively pursued by youngsters of that community. The good folk of Paramin will be the next community to benefit from this initiative.
As fate would have it, Raphael's contentious departure from leadership of the national chess body has turned out to be a giant stroke of good luck for the sport as a whole. He himself recognises this as he says, "I would never have been able to do so much for the game I love had I remained in the Association."