To the cheers of their classmates, faculty, staff, and CMSD CEO Eric Gordon himself, the chess team at John Marshall High School departed for Memphis early Thursday morning to compete in the 2022 U.S. high school chess championship.
Having emerged victorious at the district level and placing third in the Greater Cleveland Scholastic League this season, John Marshall is the premier team in CMSD, anchored by captain Akshar Patel (CMSD’s highest-ranked player by chess rating) and driven to success by a core of players who have competed together since seventh and eighth grade.
Six out of the team’s 10 members played for CMSD’s Joseph Gallagher Middle School in 2019, and placed sixth in their division at the national high school tournament that year, a Cinderella story documented in Scene. That team was composed almost entirely of recent immigrants from India and Nepal, and chess was the vehicle by which they became inseparable friends.
Now coached by John Marshall Physics teacher Cameron Cutler, the team looks to build on its recent local success on a national stage. (Cutler told Scene that over the past month in particular, the team has been playing with a special fire.)
As the players have grown and advanced, so too have their competitors, and the dominance they enjoyed as youngsters is now far from assured. But the team was calm and collected Thursday morning, sipping on hot chocolate, chatting among themselves and posing for photos in matching black hoodies in the pre-dawn chill.
Eleventh-grader Nouh Shaikh remains the de facto team spokesman and said being able to travel to the national championship in Memphis was a “great opportunity” for John Marshall.
“We’ll try to do even better this year [than in 2019]” he said.
John Marshall Principal Sara Kidner expressed gratitude to both the school and the wider CMSD community for their contributions that made the trip possible, including the athletic department, which coordinated logistics. (The drive to the Memphis hotel will be close to 12 hours, and the team will return Monday after a grueling weekend of matches.)
Scene learned Thursday that our coverage of the Gallagher exploits in 2019 was in fact pivotal in keeping the team intact. Kidner told Scene that the year most of them graduated from Gallagher, John Marshall had reached its student capacity, and there wasn’t enough room to accept all of them. But Gallagher chess coach Amit Ghose brought copies of the Scene story to administrators and pleaded with them to keep the team together.
“How do you say no to that?” Kidner said. “We said, even if they have to sit on the floor, we’ll make it work.”
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This article appears in Apr 6-19, 2022.
