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STEVENAGE CHESS CLUB
Minutes of the Annual General Meeting Holy Trinity Church Parish Room Monday 8th September 2008, commencing 7.45 p.m.
Present at the meeting: Paul Bainger, Adam Batson, David Belton, Mark Duggin, Graham Howard, Arthur James, Len Jones, Chris Lean (Chairman), Phil Maguire, Derick Price, Mike Price, Neil Rashbrook, Steve Rawlings, Dominic Robinson, Graham Williams.
1. Apologies for absence: Kai Jaeger, Chris Majer, Ken Maynard.
2. Minutes of the meeting held on 10th September 2007.
a) Approval: The minutes were agreed and signed. b) Matters arising i. Equipment. Ken Maynard had conducted an audit of the clocks in the previous week. Six digital clocks had been purchased during the season, which had been used in some of the first team matches. ii. Advertising. It was suggested that an advert of the club giving our successes could be submitted to the Comet to be included in the “Town & Around” section.
3. Reports on season 2007/08.
a) 1st team. As with most of the other Stevenage teams, the 1st team had an excellent year and only missed out on promotion to the top division by the narrowest of margins. That was to a very strong St. Albans 1 team, which was able to put out a higher graded player on Board 5 than we could on Board 1!
Although we lost early points with a 4-1 defeat to St. Albans, we kept winning against the other weaker sides, this mainly due to being able to field close to our best team for most of the matches. After a stunning 3-2 win over St. Albans in the return match, we actually looked like we would get promoted above them. Even after a sickening reversal against Royston 2 when we looked certain to beat them, we only had to win matches against Bishop’s Stortford and Little Heath to make sure of promotion. Unfortunately your captain inexplicably blundered off the board accepting a draw in a won position and it was left to St. Albans to win their last 3 games and steal the glory.
The key to our success was, as I have mentioned, having a great availability throughout the year; we only needed to use 2 extra players in addition to the nominated five, and they only needed to play a total of 7 games so they were left free to continue playing for the 2nd team to the end of the season.
Three players had exceptionally good seasons: Chris Majer scored 7/11 on boards 2 or 1; Giampiero managed 8.5/12 with only a single loss all season; And finally Adam scored an amazing 9.5/12. But thanks to everyone who played, especially those from the 2nd team who helped out when needed.
Hopefully everyone will all do as well again this year and we will gain that elusive promotion.
Finally, a special thanks to Ken who is giving up playing for the 1st team (I believe) after many years with Stevenage – despite a poor season results-wise he still manages to play some fantastic games, certainly it is a lot more interesting to watch Ken’s games than to play mine.
Phil Maguire |