Quote Originally Posted by Hal Bond View Post
2017 NAYCC

The conflicts with international youth events and Canada’s national championships are not going away. We may wish to revisit our own schedules. The USCF hosted this year’s event in New Jersey, immediately following the CYCC and concurrent with the Canadian Open. The negative impact on attendance at the CO was overshadowed before our kids could make their first move. I have filed an official complaint with FIDE America about this tournament.

The organizers refused to provide conditions for the HoD or any food allowance for official players. They also refused to provide clocks for the tournament. The clock issue may have precipitated an extraordinary attempt to change the time control prior to the first round. This would have invalidated the titles which the players were there to earn. Congratulations to HoD Victoria Doknjas for holding her ground at the Technical meeting. The original time control remained in force.

Two more issues followed. Two sections experienced a restart of the first round after about 30 minutes of play. This was done to accommodate additional players. Finally, the playing venue was not secure and players were allowed to visit with non participants during play. This led to an incident regarding peanut allergies and one of our players withdrawing from the tournament. A separate complaint has been filed about the Chief Arbiter in this connection.

Congratulations to our title winners:

Qu, Greta, CAN, ID 2627221 - WCM title, cond. rtg 1800, for bronze medal
Zhong, Kevon, CAN, ID 2624907 - CM title, cond. rtg 2000, for silver medal
Huang, Qiuyu, CAN, ID 2619903 - FM title, cond. rtg 2100, for gold medal
What I found appalling was that the organizer/arbiter also aimed a string of profanities against the parent that protested about the opponent eating peanuts. He also threatened the player with the peanut allergy with banishment from USCF tournaments and at one point threatened to call the police. He backed down on that threat when the optics of the situation probably came home to him when the parent told him fine, call the police. I am also told that this was not the first time that this opponent had eaten peanuts while playing a Canadian who had a peanut allergy so these actions seem willful and intentional with potentially fatal consequences.

Further there was no effort made by the organizers to prevent cell phone use during the tournament nor was there enough supervision or enough arbiters to manage four very large rooms of players.

We often have to worry about players going to tournaments in some worrisome parts of the world but I never thought that the U.S.A. would be a location that we would have to worry about sending our kids to.