LINCOLNVILLE, Maine — Chess is a game that offers essential life skills. It can sharpen minds both young and old, as people try to strategize their next move and capture 32 different pieces over 64 squares.
Coach Bruce Haffner focuses his time on teaching chess to the younger generation. It's game he says can help students learn many lifelong lessons.
Mr. Bruce, as the kids call him, started teaching chess in Illinois in 1994, when his son was four years old. He taught in the schools his son attended until going full-time teaching chess in 2005 to more than 400 kids in the Glenville, Illinois area. For the past decade or so, Haffner has called Maine home.
Haffner has built a chess program and created a space for kids in four Maine school districts: Camden-Rockport, Lincolnville, Belfast, and Hope. Many of these students now compete in state and national chess competitions. Six state champions have been coached by Mr. Bruce.
For him, teaching kids to know their way around a chessboard is a lot more than just focusing on the game. It's about learning that hard work pays off.
"I don't teach openings. Openings are in books. Learning how to think is a special skill that you need to work on, and it's useful in life," Haffner explained. "I tell kids, 'When you get out of school, you got three questions you've got to answer: What do you know? What can you do? And what can you do for me?' What do you know is kind of up to you. I tell them to read three hours a day; it doesn't matter what. Something you are interested in. What can you do? Hopefully it's solve puzzles, and hopefully it's creatively, and I think you get that from chess."
The "chess homework" Haffner gives his students—to read 3 hours a day—he believes will help them find what interests them, so that they have a good idea of what they want to spend their life doing when they graduate from school.
"I tell them, I say, 'Hey! The better you get at chess, the more able you are going to be to compete with the robots, the computers, the machines when you get out of school,'" Haffner said.
"I play in my free time, and then I play soccer every time I can," one student said.
Mr. Bruce said he fully support kids playing sports, but he always tells his students the skills that come from chess will help them get a job easier when they grow up.
"One of my bigger battles is with athletics—middle school, high school," Haffner explained. "I have coaches who say to their kids, 'You need to come to all our events,' and I go, 'What about my events?'"
Across the four schools districts, Mr. Bruce teaches chess to about 100 kids.
"You need to be able to put together a strategy and attack. The kids who try and win with one move lose to kids who can see three moves ahead," the coach explained.
As with anything, the more you do it, the better you get. He encourages students to play the game as much as they can if they want to get better. He said many of his students have chess games on their phone or they play online, which is another way they can get better.
Another key to his team's success is teaching the game to any interested parents, so kids have someone to play with at home.
"So one day Bruce kind of glanced over at me and he said, 'Hey stick around, you might learn something here,'" Kate Irving, a mother of two chess students, recalled.
Irving picked up the game pretty quickly, and based on the benefits she saw from the game, is now on the board of the Maine Chess Association, getting even more kids from across the state into the game.
"What a great outlet it was for them. At the time my son was playing a lot of video games at home, which was fine, but all of a sudden he is now really interested in this cool strategic game, and it gave him this fabulous outlet for special creativity," Irving explained. "All of a sudden, he started doing a lot better in school, his test scores started going way up, which was really cool."
Irving said the game has also given both of her sons some good friendships.
"I think there is no replacement for finding something you're really good at and being able to do," she said. "It gives you a sense of confidence in other aspects of his life as well."
As another way to encourage his students to be their very best and have fun while doing it, Mr. Bruce told them a few months ago that whoever did best at the state championship out of all the schools he teaches at, he would let those students shave his head. The students from Camden-Rockport scored the highest overall and got to do the honors.
This summer, Mr. Bruce will be spearheading a summer chess camp along with five other instructors. Beginners are welcome, and the details for that camp can be found below.
If you are interested in registering your child, you can call or text Haffner at 847-987-3091. You can also email him at brucehaffner@gmail.com.