Your Move
(sample)
Late last April, the historically-restrained little world of high school chess drew unprecedented public attention following an outbreak of physical violence during a Chicago-area tournament. This attempt at oral history aims to reconstruct the incident, and, more crucially, its causes, in the words of those most qualified to speak. The victim declined to comment. The perpetrator, by contrast, was eager to tell her side of the story.
PARKER SABATINI, junior at the time of Checkmates: The really tragic irony—and, truly, I’ve thought about this—is that because of what I did, all anybody’ll remember are the games I lost that day. Two games at Checkmates. Never mind all the ones I won that year, or even from earlier that day. And there was some tough competition. And I don’t expect your sympathy. I figure once people’ve got their phones out filming you trying to beat your opponent to death with a board… not a nice regulation wood board, but not, like, the roll-up placemat either. Blows were landed. It was not my finest moment. I’m acknowledging that. But you don’t want to hear about me, I’m assuming, not even from me. You want to hear about Ali. Well, we’ll get there. But please don’t forget me. I’m sure that you will.
MORGAN SCHNEIDERMAN, junior / chess club founder: The club really started on a whim. It’s probably the only chess club to start in a Fiddler [on the Roof] rehearsal. See, Parker and I’d had a lot of fun doing the plays in middle school, but after moving up, bigger crowd, deeper talent… it’s not like either of us was a brilliant actress, but, our first high school show, we got villagers, and dammit, I am tiny—I could totally have handled Shprintze or Bielke, with lines, they’re the youngest. We were starting to notice that we didn’t fit in among the high school theatrical community. Like, we’d always get along—all the drama kids are cool—but we weren’t really one of them.—Two of them.—We were kids who did drama, we weren’t drama kids. We decided, well, what else can we do to find our people. And my suggestion was a games club, I thought we’d get into all sorts of sh—stuff eventually, D&D [Dungeons & Dragons], [Settlers of] Catan, but we’ll start small, simple, academic, so the school will let us do it, and we started with chess, and… we never really stopped. Like, what they say about chess—and I believe it—is, you can learn the rules in two minutes but to really learn the game takes a lifetime. I know I’m not done with it, or it with me. And I bet no matter how mad she is at chess, or God, or the universe right now, you’d hear the same from Parker.
RONALD STEUBEN, principal: Well, curiously, Parker and I started at Lincoln South around the same time. I was coming off an interim vice-principal position in Deerfield, one I’d taken with reluctance to help fill a gap while still teaching five sections of American history—so you see that life is what happens when you’ve got other plans. I realized that I had some ability as an administrator and that, for lots of reasons, I wasn’t connecting in the classroom any more. It’s not that I cared any less, it’s that, frankly, these kids are in a whole different world. Never mind the technology, the phones, it’s their mindset. They’re whip-smart, they’re ahead of you, they’re looking to get what they’re worth and they don’t want to sit through some old guy droning on about the Panic of 1837, that’s not what gets you internships. I felt irrelevant, and sometimes it’s okay to step aside and let someone more naturally gifted take your place. It wasn’t the easiest time here when I arrived. A year or two before there’d been a cheating scandal, complete with rolling heads. They even renamed the school, as symbolic rebirth, and also at the request of another Adlai [E.] Stevenson High School out in Lake County. They’d thought to revert to the original name, Lincoln, but of course that was taken nearby, so somehow a school on the North Shore became Lincoln South. And that’s the environment that I, and of course Ms. Sabatini, entered into. So the point is, I had a lot on my plate that first year, which limited my student interaction. But even I had heard about this promising young freshman, Ali Wolfhart. She was someone to watch out for.
LLOYD DETWILER, sophomore: Ali. Jesus Christ, I’d never seen any—I didn’t know there were girls like Ali.
MORGAN: I actually never took chess super-seriously before [founding the club]. Like, Parker played online and stuff, she knew her ranking number. She had books to be our library and stuff. I was just someone who liked the odd game. That’s why Parker let me found the club, find a faculty advisor, get some boards—she’d tackle curriculum, discussions, whatever we’d do. She was better at that stuff than me.
TRUDI TRAN, math teacher / chess club advisor: Well, I thought it’d be a hoot. [Morgan] was one of those girls that your heart goes out to, always pushing up her glasses with her finger as she stares at the floor as she talks to you: “Oh, gee, Ms. Tran, we just need a teacher to sign off on the club, you wouldn’t have to do much, but maybe could we use your room…” This may not surprise you, but a lot of math teachers remember what it’s like to be that kid. And she was right, there wasn’t much [for me] to do. Parker had it down. I hung around for their first few get-togethers just to see, you know, if they could ride the bike all by themselves. Now, I hadn’t had Parker in my class—she was advanced, she took sophomore math as a freshman—so this was my introduction to her work. She went right up front, said, “For our opening session, a session on openings,” and boom, she was off to the races. She took control.
PARKER: We didn’t have a cast of thousands at first. We were new, of course, and freshmen, so older kids probably thought, oh, this is just a rinky-dink thing—which it was! We were totally informal. No mandatory meetings. No tournaments that year. No budget, no banquet, no trips. Just a place you could go during lunch. Lincoln South is… a bit of a pressure cooker. Everyone’s expected to overachieve, get into Harvard or at least Northwestern. I think people valued having a place where they could use their brains just for fun.
MORGAN: We did have another girl [our] sophomore spring. But she moved.
PARKER: By junior year, we had our little group, a core plus a few who drifted in and out. All boys. No surprises there, sadly. We were mostly picking up “irregulars”, in Morgan’s terminology. Ralph Palumbo some Fridays. [John] Hershey when he wasn’t always sick. But we weren’t on the map. Not till Ali showed up. It was early October. I hear it was a really bad fall.—That wasn’t a pun.
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