Tuesday 30 March 2010

ACT Schools Team Events - Term 1

The Schools teams events in Canberra traditionally start with the girls events in Term 1. The logic behind this is that the girls teams get to warm up against each other, before unleashing havoc in the Term 2 Open events.
The two events were the ACT Girls Secondary Championship and the ACT Girls Primary Championship, and the finals of both were played over the last few days.
The Secondary Championship is run as an individual swiss, with the team score calculated by adding up the scores of the best 4 players from each school. Lyneham High were the winning team, finishing ahead of traditional girls powerhouse Alfred Deakin High.
The Primary Schools was played in the more traditional 4 board format, with the final consisting of 23 teams (from a qualifying pool of 70+ teams). This years winner was Curtin Primary (making it at least 3 wins in a row), ahead of Turner Primary, with Radford edging out Amaroo for third on tiebreak.
Next term sees the Open Schools events, with the Primary Schools qualifying sections attracting close to 1000 players over the 6 zones.
Full results from this year (and past years) can be found at the ACTJCL website.

1 comment:

Libby said...

The Canberra Times covered Monday's Primary Girls Final (we had both a reporter and photographer) and their story is expected in next Tuesday's "Personal Best" lift out.

Curtin Primary (for fear of justifiable accusation of tooting my own - school - horn), have been ACT Girls' Schools Champions in 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 & 2010. Placing 2nd, 3rd and 3x 1st at the ASTC over that time. Given we have 250-300 girls compete each year it's not as easy as their own school appears to suspect (where the debate again rages over finacial support for representative chess players or even having chess and "academic pursuits" on the same footing as basketball).

On the question of the success of Lyneham over "traditional girls powerhouse Alfred Deakin" - I can support the idea that ADHS should have been a powerhouse but this is actually only their second team entry EVER in the competition. They only previously competed in 2006, with a team of all Year 7 girls (12yrs) and won the ACT competition, placed 2nd at the ASTC against much older teams, and then retired to rarely be seen over a board again. This year, Megan Setiabudi led them back with 2x ex-Curtin girls and one player who had not played competitively before. It's a good effort but the powerhouses in recent years have probably been Radford & Daramalan. Lyneham have a great team this year with Emma Guo and a group of girls who ran behind Curtin (for Turner) over the last couple of years.

Cheers

Libby