Akron chess coach Kala Bagley and CCL have joined force to help to make Akron a chess force in Ohio.  Coach Kala will preform the Pre-CCL function in the Greater Akron area and once her students reach the needed level of chess competence, they will graduate into automatic acceptance into the CCL school.  For more information on Coach Kala Bagley and her Akron chess programs, please CLICK HERE.

The girls did great at the Ohio All-Girls with CCL winning all of the top 6 individual trophies and top team trophy.  Well that is if we count Stella, a long time CCL student who recently stopped taking lessons due to school activities.

The 4-way tie for 1^st was between (in tie-break  order):
Stella Huang – Ohio All-Girls Co-champion – who will represent Ohio at the National All-Girls
Sneha Prabu – Ohio All-Girls Co-champion
Emma Cheng – Ohio All-Girls Co-champion
Victoria Baker – Ohio All-Girls Co-champion

5^th-6^th in tie break order:
Lainie Massick
Alina Niu

Adeti Mohanselvan who came in tied for 7^th and, along with Lainie Massick, won the 1^st place team trophy for Columbus Academy.

Congratulations to our latest and 19th CCL graduate, Alex Koley.

• Alex is the first person from California to become a CCL graduate.
• CCL continues to spread its wings with its last 5 graduates coming from 5 different states.
  
• Alex is only in 5th grade and brought his rating from 1400 to  2000 in the year and a half that he has been in CCL.
• See Alex’s self-annotated game that helped to propel him to graduate by clicking HERE.
• This Who’s Who chess list has been growing with great talent which is clearly characterized by a high value on perseverance, hard work, and passion.
• What is a CCL graduate?  It is an honorary degree that we give to any CCL player who has worked their way through the ranks while in CCL and has made a USCF experts rating (>= 2000).   This group is becoming a who’s who of the top young talent around. It entitles them to lifetime membership in CCL, based on good behavior, without the requirement of taking lessons (although most still do).  They are allowed to receive email spam from me for the rest of their lives!!
• Who will be next?

CCL graduates are (in order of obtainment):

• John Hughes
• Walker Griggs
• Maggie Feng
• Rahul Ramaswamy
• Annorjan Naguleswaran
• Luke Xie
• Chris Shen
• Noah Keating-Adams
• Sam Massick
• Anagh Kulkarni
• Vikram Srivastava
• Aristo Liu
• Abhi Ramaswamy
• Jason Wang
• Ricky Wang
• Vincent Baker
• Forest Chen
• Neo Zhu
• Alex Kolay