to those whom much is given
I recently came across a post by Meg Myers; in it she suggests that the ACBL/USBF (hereafter: The League) doesn’t do enough of the right kinds of things to promote bridge among young people.
Bridge is a wonderful game, and you don’t need gimmicks to lure kids into it. Even though my days as a junior are waning, I plan to enjoy everything that remains available to me and all players in the game for the rest of my life.
Meg Myers, Promoting Bridge to Young Players
I couldn’t agree more. In fact, over the couple of weeks I’ve been studying various aspects of this issue, I think I’ve figured out the problem: we, Meg and I, imagine that the Junior program is (at least in part) a tool for young player recruitment. It isn’t. If we occasionally encourage Juniors to invite non-bridge-playing friends to take a look at our game, it is a social courtesy rather than a focused attempt by The League to recruit a new player.
aim higher
The League is currently targeting elementary and middle school children with initiatives like Patty Tucker’s highly successful Youth NABC. I’ve read quite a bit about adolescent brain development and agree wholeheartedly that the mental skills we use in bridge are broadly applicable across many areas of life and children and teenagers can only benefit from practice thinking like a bridge player. But research also suggests that the adolescent (and younger) brain isn’t ready to manage and process the game’s volumes of information so impulse-driven and cause-and-effect heavy.
Did your parents play bridge when you were a child?
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Teaching bridge to school children is a risky, long-term solution to the problems of dwindling membership numbers and the advancing average age of players. We’ve endplayed ourselves into teaching bridge in schools because young parents aren’t playing — my neighbors and acquaintances look vague and mention chess and poker when they hear I’m a bridge player. Sometimes they have aunts or grandmothers or in rare instances parents who played, but none of the people I’ve met in the community have ever seen a bridge hand played, start to finish. The problem, of course, is that there’s almost no bridge being played on college campuses.
I stumbled upon bridge the old fashioned way: in the Student Union when I was an undergraduate. I was open to it because my parents were card players when I was a child: Pinochle, Hearts, Spades, Cribbage, Gin, country club and party bridge. It was very common on American campuses in the 60s and 70s to find tables of bridge being played in the public places where students gathered; by the time I went to school in the 80s bridge had disappeared from the Student Union, but it was alive and well in the International House on campus. It didn’t matter that the bridge we played in college wasn’t good, it was outrageous fun and when I grew up and moved away and wanted to meet new people, I found a community of bridge players and ventured in. What got me there in my twenties was a nonstop party and that early childhood exposure, what keeps me coming back in my thirties is bridge itself.
When, at 38, I still can’t get through a tournament without hearing “how NICE it is to see young people playing bridge,” I can’t help but think The League gets the whole age thing wrong. We shouldn’t be inviting schoolkids to play anywhere but in the league-sponsored babysitting room; we should call our 18-22 year olds “Youth” and bump the “Junior” designation up to 22-35.
If The League was serious about recruiting players, it would go grassroots: into the places where future players are trained and hang out. Instead of elementary and middle school students, we should be targeting the other end of the spectrum: students in business schools and law schools and medical schools. We should be targeting young teachers and CPAs and the whole mass of ambitious, career-minded 26 to 35 year olds upon whom is dawning the realization that youth is wasted on the young.
squandering money and stuff
Instead of creating programs that broaden the base of lifelong casual and avid players who’ll instill in their own children an enduring love of the game, The League invests millions of dollars in maintaining a highly effective farm system for bridge professionals.
The USBF is responsible for selecting, training and supporting United States teams in World Youth Team Championships. ACBL transfers $50,000 each year from the ACBL Junior Fund to USBF to provide funding for Junior teams. In addition, USBF supports Juniors who wish to participate in other World Junior competitions and in World Junior Bridge Camps. USBF.com - Junior Bridge
That “in addition” part means that the $50k combines with the generous contributions of East and West Coast Units, private individuals and charitable foundations for the care and feeding — literally — of our Junior players abroad. The Junior program clearly works: take a look at some of the household names (my household, anyway) who’ve played in Junior World Championships over two decades since they began:
1987: Jan Jansma, Barry Westra, Benedicte Cronier, Jean-Christophe Quantin, Franck Multon, Aaron Silverstein. 1989: Andrew Robson, Mike Cappelletti Jr 1991: John Diamond, Martha Katz, Brian Platnick, Wayne Stuart, Debbie Zuckerberg, Diego Brenner, Miguel Villas-Boas, Fred Gitelman, Geoff Hampson, Bronia Gmach, Ilan and Ophir Herbst, Geir Helgemo, Brad Moss, Rev Murthy 1993: Klaus Reps, Nick L’Ecuyer, Claudio Nunes, Federico Primavera, Antonio Sementa, Alfredo Versace, Ishmael DelMonte, Eric Greco, Richard Pavlicek Jr 1995: Jason and Justin Hackett, Joel Wooldridge 1997: Shannon Lipscomb, Chris Willenken, Alexander Petrunin, Boye Brogeland, Darren Wolpert 1999: Stelio and Furio DiBello, Gavin Wolpert, Kevin Bathurst, John Hurd, Joe Grue, John Kranyak, Brad Campbell, Kent Mignocchi, Augustin Madala, Pablo Ravenna 2001: Carlos Pellegrini, Paul Bethe, Jason Feldman, Ari Greenberg, Niek and Sjoert Brink, Bas Drijver, Inon Liran, Olivier and Thomas Bessis, Julien Gaviard, Ian Boyd, Vince Demuy, Roberto Barbosa 2003: Fabio Lo Presti, Daniel Lavee, Mike and Jon Rice, Joaquin Pacarau, Benjamin Robles 2005: Justin Lall, Eldad Ginossar, Espen Lindqvist 2006: Josh Donn
My gripe about the Junior Program is this: we are spending our money to train children who probably would’ve played bridge at the top anyway, and doing it at a time when the game in America is dying of old age. Cappelletti, Katz, Stuart, Moss, Pavlicek, Wooldridge, Lipscomb, Wolpert, Bathurst, Grue, Kranyak, Bethe, Feldman, Lall: second generation, at least. There wasn’t a Junior program when Billy Cohen was coming up, or Michael and Janice Seamon, or Jill Levin, or the Beckers, or Judi Radin — but they’re all children of tournament-bridge-playing families, too.
to those whom much is given
It would make so much more sense if, in addition to funding lessons for random schoolkids and international vacations for the children of our best players, The League dedicated resources to the recruitment of 30-50 year olds. It’s great that we’re growing so many top professional players — but if we don’t also swell the base and recruit capable players and sponsors, what good is it? The fat economy made quite a few bridge careers, and I’ll be surprised if the downturn doesn’t break some. I keep looking over my shoulder, but there doesn’t seem to be anybody younger coming behind me looking to hire teams.
In my marketing plan, instead of the School Bridge League and the Buffett Cup Boondoggle, we’d leverage our most valuable resources in ways that directly impact the bottom line. First, I think we should introduce a service component into the Junior Program. Second, we should stage thoughtfully-planned and carefully-executed exhibition matches where they’ll do the most good.
Specifically: ask the Juniors who played in the World Championships do a tour of select college campuses throughout the coming year, spending a week or ten days hanging out in cafes and Student Unions for several hours a day, playing bridge. Not asking them to do anything other than grab a table and play a whole lot of cards, chat up the people who inevitably stop by, make it a show. Start with a select group of schools: Big 10, Ivy League, the California powerhouses. Send our Juniors out to show off bridge where potential bridge players are likely to be found, then follow up with Homecoming exhibition matches. Played on campuses, in the Student Unions when possible, matches captained by superstars who get in on the action and a variety of players who fit the description.
When we are able to bring our superstars into matches on campus — Bill Gates as playing captain in a match of Ivy Dropouts versus Ivy Grads played at Harvard — the student and mainstream media will flock to our superstar, but the story will be the game. Are there half a dozen judges in our realm? How about an alumni team captained by Amalya Kearse played against a team of lawyers. Ask Warren Buffett to captain and play for Wall Street in a match versus Cliff Meltzer’s Silicon Valley, that sort of thing. Play the matches on college campuses and leave behind a foursome or two of our best and brightest Juniors to sit around the cafe or Student Union playing continuous rubbers. It’d be excellent much-needed practice for the players and, I think, a more effective recruitment strategy.
October 21st, 2008 at 11:51 am
i was only a few years behind you, but i don’t remember bridge being played in the student lounge. we all gathered at your place or various other kitchen tables by the time i was really getting interested. when you moved on, there wasn’t anyone left with whom to play. so i agree with you that getting bridge back into the student unions on college campuses would be a good place to recruit!
October 22nd, 2008 at 8:37 am
I wholeheartedly agree with you. When I lived in Clearwater we made a deal with Barnes and Knoble across the street from our bridge club. Once a week 8 of our bridge players spent two hours playing bridge in the cafe. We recruited dozens of new players just because they were intreged with the game we were playing. It didn’t cost our club anything and it was wonderful exposure for the game we all love.
Oh yes, Go Rays. Patty
October 22nd, 2008 at 9:44 am
What about online? When (mostly young) people saw poker on TV and wanted to try it, they went to their computers and just started to play. They didn’t know what they were doing at first, but eventually they learned. They read message boards, bought books, talked about it with friends, or just made mistakes and learned from that.
Would this model work with bridge? Is bridge too complicated for this approach?
October 27th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
I think you make several excellent points. The only juniors who really get nurtured in the current program are the ones who were going to grow up to be bridge pros anyway.
I love your idea of the college tour, also. I’d definitely be in for something like that:)
October 27th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
Nice post. And I especially agreed with your point that rather than stop funding juniors completely because the ones that would be playing anyway are getting the money, reroute that money to get new players to play. I wrote a similar thing on rec.games.bridge in 2006 (http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.bridge/msg/e99b5dc8c4f8dd8c) and have continued to vocalize this opinion when possible.
October 28th, 2008 at 6:55 am
I heartily agree.
I played social bridge as a teenager, even teaching maybe half a dozen friends to play, some of whom still play socially to this day. University was where I thought I would encounter the game, but in 4 years I never saw it once.
Shame, really.