Annette John-Hall: City students use chess to claim their victories

All over Philadelphia, thousands of students have declared war.

Ask the 3,000 kids who battle each other every day after school what weapons they use, and they won't say a gun, or a knife, or even a basketball - although that's what a lot of people would think.

These kids will tell you they'd rather skip the trash-talking. They'd duke it out in silence - on a chessboard.

Their soldiers are pawns, rooks, and bishops. Their ammunition? Brain power.

The game may never make the sports headlines, but, after ebbing with the budget cuts of the '90s, chess is back as the after-school activity of choice. Seven Philadelphia chess teams from five public and two private schools will compete in the nationals in Nashville in May.

Among them are first-time champs Fels High, along with powerhouses Masterman, Blankenburg Elementary, and the Russell Byers Charter School squad, coached by principal Salome Thomas-El, loosely credited with resurrecting chess in the Philadelphia schools.

Thomas-El's team at Vaux Middle School won eight national titles during the mid-1990s. At Byers elementary, his youngest player, Elijah Jones, is only 7, but Elijah is good enough to play two-hour matches, record his opponents' moves in algebraic notation, and compete in Nashville.

"I really like taking people's queens," the diminutive first grader says.

"I just love playing chess," adds teammate Ayannah Woods, 11, whose grown-up goal is to become a police officer - and a grandmaster. "Chess is like war, but it's not violent. It's a good way to take out your anger, but nobody gets hurt. It helps with math because you have to think of your opponent like a problem - 'How do I solve it?' "

Pretty heady stuff for a sixth grader. But it's the norm at Byers, where the chess club draws more and more students every day. In fact, in a game traditionally thought to be better suited to the male analytical mind, Woods and Dyamond Allen - a pair of 11-year-old girls - are the team's top players.

That's the thing about chess: It challenges the low expectations thrust on inner-city kids, and shows them they can be smart, can achieve, can look forward to all sorts of possibilities. There's more to the future than a dream about sports.

Chess urges them to love themselves. Chess tells them smart is cool. Chess lets them know you don't have to dunk on somebody to succeed.

"Kids who carry chessboards, if you don't assume anything else about them, you assume they're intelligent," says Thomas-El, 44, author of the memoir I Choose to Stay, which tells the story of chess' influence on students' lives. "Using your brain is unheard of for some people. But these kids, they're changing their self-concept."

Demitrius Carroll, 26, experienced the change firsthand. He was one of the kids who exchanged his sneakers for a chessboard while at Vaux. Now the Kutztown University graduate is assisting Thomas-El with the Byers team.

"I would probably be on the street if it wasn't for chess," said Carroll, who is working on a master's in public administration at Strayer University. "Chess is the muse for everything I do."

At Fels, school pride in the chess team - seniors Heip Song, Khalif Coaxum, Xingdi Lin, Cijo Joseph, and sophomore Trung Nguyen - is palpable. That's because they went into the city playoffs seeded dead last, and wound up winning the state title.

"They want to play. They're determined to play," said Nick Ehling, the team's 30-year-old coach. "Their talent surpassed my own a long time ago."

The players get treated like NBA stars. They get high-fived in the hallway, and their board prowess has made others curious. On any given day, it's not unusual to see other teachers, students, and staff members looking for a game.

It's how the culture of low expectations gets changed.

"We have to be able to dangle that academic carrot," Thomas-El said. "We have to make the big man on campus the tutor, not the athlete."

Check. And checkmate.