A decade ago my daughter, a volunteer in grade school, asked me to help with her after-school chess class. It became the highlight of a year I vividly remember. What immediately struck me was the eagerness of the students to play chess and compete.

I recall one student getting frustrated to the point he’d wipe the chess pieces off the board mid-play. His mother helped out so I became aware that, although quick to learn the fundamental moves of chess, he had a serious attention deficit problem. Most students refused to play with him given his disruptions, but not all. I was eventually able to get him to finish a game and recall the tears in his mother’s eyes.

We organized a competition with students teamed according to their grade for the final day of class. I purchased three gilded trophy cups of different sizes and displayed them before the competition started. One student said, “Those are not gold.” I answered, “Just hold them and see how heavy they are.” “Wow,” he proclaimed to his classmates, “those are real gold,” determined to win a cup.

I devised a scoring system using a spread sheet to keep track of the competition in real-time. The kids crowded around my laptop, eagerly giving me the results of their play and checking their accumulated scores.

Parents showed up and began to hover over their children’s chess boards till I physically waived them off saying, “they need to concentrate.” I can’t begin to relate the excitement of the winners of the trophy cups. One winner grabbed her cup and quickly ran out of the room.

The two finalists competing for the largest “golden” cup had to stop playing at the end of the day, so I declared the winner the player with the most valuable pieces left on the board.

The school principal gave a little speech as she handed out signed paper certificates for each participant. “Everyone is a winner,” she announced, missing entirely the point of the competition. Chess teaches the value of learning a skill, the challenge of competing, the joy of winning. In short, an important lesson for life.