Newsletter – March 2021 – Silicon Valley Youth Bridge

We publish an email newsletter three times a year with articles about Silicon Valley Youth Bridge. It contains information of interest to parents, children, teachers and others.

Receive Our Email Newsletter

March 2021

President’s Corner
Brendon Ge, New Life Master
Youth Bridge Association
Volunteer Spotlight – Alan Templeton
Junior Day anniversary Party

Previous Issues

President’s Corner

While online bridge has existed for decades, 2020 was most certainly its breakout year. Duplicate clubs and lessons are now held online, groups have regularly scheduled team games, and social bridge is online with Zoom for table talk. As clubs and tournaments organizers begin planning for in-person games to resume, what is the future of online bridge? Certainly both face-to-face and virtual bridge will each continue to have their places. Online bridge may continue to dominate for youth bridge, as it easily adapts to schedule and geography constraints. SiVY Bridge intends to remain a part of the online youth bridge play and learn landscape.

Stories in this newsletter cover the online events that SiVY Bridge has sponsored, information about the newest efforts to introduce bridge to young people – the Youth Bridge Association and its co-founder Michael Xu, a volunteer spotlight on Alan Templeton, and a story about the newest Bay Area youth life master, Brandon Ge.

Throughout 2020 and now into 2021, SiVY Bridge and its volunteers have continued our mission to inspire the next generation of bridge players with our online bridge events. Every other Friday either a Casual Friday or Virtual Pizza Party is planned from 4-6 p.m. These activities give youth a chance to play bridge with other young players, receive coaching from adult mentors, and compete for prizes.

In our volunteer spotlight this month, we shine a light on Alan Templeton. Alan is a founding volunteer and SiVY Bridge Board member, a frequent teacher and table helper for Pizza Parties and Summer Camp, an official photographer, and the creator of the SiVY Bridge website. In 2020 Alan completely redesigned the site, modernizing the technology, updating the navigation, and improving its look and feel. Alan’s dedication to SiVY Bridge, and particularly to the website, is integral to the organization’s success. If you haven’t looked at SiVYBridge.org lately, check it out!

Randy Ryals
President, SiVY Bridge

Brandon Ge, New Life Master

Brandon Ge is a Bay Area 9th grader who started his bridge career about five years ago and is the most recent SiVY Bridge alumnus to achieve Life Master.

His bridge achievements are an impressive lot: 2019 District 21 Flight C Grand National Team winners and runners-up at the National level, member of the Under 16 team of the USBF, a crazy number of Regional and Sectional wins, and impressive finishes in several of the online events held since the pandemic began. Brandon was 11^th in North America in 2020 Mini McKenney Youth category and 9^th in his category in District 21. He and frequent partner Olivia won first overall in the Youth NABC two session pairs held online in July, 2020.

Brandon likes to talk about the GNT event that took place live in 2019. The team was playing solidly but lost in the final round by 1 IMP, missing their chance to represent the District at the National level! Of course all members of the team were reviewing each moment where he or she could have played differently and win the event. One week later they were rewarded with the win as the other team had a member with too many points and was disqualified! Brandon’s team went on to place second at the National level.

When asked what he loves about bridge, Brandon had this to say, “bridge is amazing because of how people of all kinds can play it. You just need to be able to sit down in a chair and think! It’s not like sports, where you cannot fully enjoy it once your body starts to grow older, but if you’re too young, you aren’t good/fit enough to play it. Bridge is a game that you can play basically at any stage in your life. You can play when you’re in your teenage years like me, or play after your retirement. You can still enjoy it just as much as anyone else.”

Regarding his recent accomplishment, Brandon explained that he had all the color point requirements fulfilled, so needed total points to achieve Life Master. Playing a lot of online bridge helped him in the final push. He said, “it felt pretty satisfying to get to the goal ☺. But now that I am past this threshold I realize this is just the start of my bridge career.”

Youth Bridge Association

By Michael Xu (with introduction by Lynn Johannesen)

The Youth Bridge Association (YBA) is an initiative formed to promote bridge among young people. It was founded by Michael Xu, Jonathan Yue, Michael Hu, and Arthur Zhou—all active in SiVY, all current members of the USA National Under-21 Team, and all former members of the USA National Under-16 Team.

All four of the YBA founders can be considered SiVY success stories, but Michael Xu has a special place. No one in his family plays bridge, and he had never played or taken a bridge class until he attended his first SiVY pizza party. Michael says he came for the free pizza—but he obviously left with a growing interest in the game. Since then, and especially after attending his first Youth North American Bridge Championship (YNABC) in Toronto in the summer of 2017, he has practiced seriously. Soon thereafter, he joined the USBF Junior Training Program at Debbie Rosenberg’s urging.

Since then, Michael has:

Earned a bronze medal in the Under-16 division of the 17^th World Youth Team Championships
Been selected for the USA 1 team in the Under-21 division for the 18^th World Youth Team Championships
Reached the final of the 2019 Grand Nationals Team Championship
Placed second in both the Pairs and the Teams competitions at the 2019 YNABC
Received the 2019 Youth Sportsmanship Award

That’s quite an impressive set of accomplishments for someone who first learned bridge only a few short years ago!

The remainder of this article tells the story of the YBA in Michael’s own words.

___________________________________________

For a long time, the founders of YBA—Jonathan Yue, Michael Hu, Arthur Zhou, and I–always had the idea of starting a youth-led initiative on promoting youth bridge. Thanks to the Covid-19 outbreak, we had a lot more free time to execute our idea. Additionally, with so many stuck at home and looking for new activities to take up, we just had to seize this perfect opportunity and recruit as many students as we could.

One specific goal of our effort was to prepare our students enough so that they can properly integrate into the bridge community. The USBF Junior Training program is amazing for more advanced juniors, but we wanted to help youth achieve a successful transition through the initial steep learning curve, from complete beginner to frequent tournament competitor.

We held our first workshop on August 8, 2020. We had 58 sign-ups, although I’m not sure how many actually attended.

Since then, we haven’t held any more workshops, but we have held three classes.We definitely suffer the problem of attrition with our class attendance, but we are proud of our relatively high maintenance rate.

In December, we held our 1st YBA Grand Online Tournament, open to all players under age 26 except for National representatives. We plan to continue hosting tournaments, and they will continue to offer prizes; for the Grand Tournament, we awarded more than $1000!

In the future, we plan on hosting fundraising events and also an introductory seminar to “hype” bridge and attract potential students to take our beginner class. Eventually, we also hope to carry out a project that’ll help middle/high school students form bridge clubs at their schools.

Although all four of us cofounders are from SiVY Bridge, our organization has no local entity. However, we’d love to collaborate with SiVY; after all, promoting youth bridge in Silicon Valley meets our mission of promoting youth bridge.

One major way that the YBA can help with SiVY Bridge efforts is by teaching beginner/intermediate SiVY youths. Once these students have some knowledge under their belt, they can compete and have fun at SiVY events, like the monthly pizza party.

Volunteer Spotlight – Alan Templeton

By Lynn Johannesen

Alan Templeton is a familiar figure at SiVY events, from pizza parties to Summer Camp to the Bay Area High School Championships. At all these events, he takes photos, sets up video displays of past events, and helps out as a table monitor. But beyond these visible roles, Alan does much more for SiVY. He was a founding Board member and still serves today. He designed SiVY’s website and continues to serve as our webmaster, updating content and adding photographs. He creates web pages to document SiVY activities and sorts and saves photos to our online photo albums. He proofreads website content, especially the articles in this Newsletter. Alan claims he was fortunate to be able to retire early, in 1994, but it seems more as if he traded one full-time job for another one—or two, since he serves as treasurer of another nonprofit, and he developed the website for the Palo Alto Unit in 2001 and has also served as treasurer and president of the Unit.

Alan was born and raised in Palo Alto and attended local schools. He received his BS in Engineering from Stanford University and his MSEE from the University of California, Berkeley. After completing his education, he started his career at the company later known as GTE, working as a software developer in the defense division. He advanced through several layers of management and retired as the senior staff member to the lab manager, where his responsibilities included setting standards, reviewing programs, and helping to acquire new programs.

Although Alan has always resided in this area, his job gave him the opportunity to experience a much wider world through field trips to install and inspect systems. He took a trip around the world from England to Japan. He later traveled to Israel, the Arctic Circle (where he experienced his first—and only—blizzard), and several times to northern Japan. Later, he traveled to monthly meetings in Washington, DC. The demands of these work-related trips did not prevent him from seeing the surrounding countryside and interacting with the local people.

Although Alan’s parents played social bridge at home, and his father also played at work, Alan didn’t start until he was in his late 40s. One of his close friends was a bridge fanatic, so he decided to learn the game. He took two adult education classes and then began to play in duplicate games. He was fortunate to find a mentor in Sherie Greenberg, with whom he became good friends. In the past Alan has played in local tournaments, but lately he has played only in club games. During Covid he is playing online, also in mostly social games, some with students from one of Frank Smoot’s classes. Alan has been a helper in those classes for many years.

Alan attended the first organizational meeting for SiVY to find out how he could help, thinking he might at least create a website for the group. At this stage, he wondered about SiVY’s prospects because it would require so much work, but he was pleased that the efforts of Debbie Rosenberg and other volunteers paid off. He feels the greatest challenge has always been finding volunteers for key activities, as is typical of volunteer organizations.

The past year has created new challenges for all of us, including SiVY. Alan thinks the shift to online events has gone well. Although he is no longer the official photographer, he has been helping as a table monitor for Casual Friday games more often than he has in the past.

He also took advantage of this time to update the SiVY website, which he has moved to WordPress on a commercial server to improve maintainability and backup capabilities. First he had to learn to create a WordPress website. Then he worked with Cheryl Haines to re-imagine the site with a new organization and messaging, and to make it more modern-looking.

Alan thinks one major challenge in the coming year will be to maintain the after-school program once stay-at-home orders are lifted. Most of SiVY’s original young participants have graduated from high school and are no longer affiliated with the group, although some do work as table helpers and teachers. The current SiVY base is younger students that we hope will grow up with the program. Thus, the after-school classes will be vital for attracting new players.

Finding the right volunteers for key positions will continue to be important. As long as SiVY has Alan, we will have the right volunteer for several key positions!

Junior Day Anniversary Party

In November, 2019 thousands of bridge players and over one hundred Junior Players participated in the North American Bridge Championship in San Francisco. Little did we know it would be the last Nationals contested face-to-face for over a year. A highlight of the event was Junior Day, held the Saturday after Thanksgiving. It featured a Youth Pairs Bridge game and well-attended party sponsored by District 21, SiVY Bridge, Peninsula Youth Bridge, and Center for Bridge Education.

This year on the Friday after Thanksgiving, the youth bridge organizations of the Bay Area sponsored an online tournament to commemorate the one year anniversary of the live event. While we could not provide food and drink as we did in 2019, we did offer comradery, competition, and prizes!