City councilman teaches IU chess

After competing and losing all four games in the first chess tournament of his high school career — including the last match to a 12-year-old — Bloomington City Councilmember Steve Volan said he was so embarrassed that he severed ties with the game he loved so much.

“I was that chess club geek in high school,” Volan said.

The tournament was just outside his hometown of Merrillville, Ind., where he graduated from Andrean High School in 1983.

His 12-year-old opponent defeated him with a back-rank checkmate, a single-piece checkmate that Volan said is a “pretty humiliating” way to lose.

He didn’t touch a chess piece again for two decades.

But in 2000, Volan began searching for a way to work with kids and reconnect with his long-lost hobby.

After ruling out volunteering with the Big Brothers Big Sisters program due to time constraints, Volan decided to start a chess club at Binford Elementary School in
Bloomington.

The first club meeting drew in more than 60 students, almost one-tenth of the student body. With the help of several other adults, Volan ran the school’s chess club for
two years.

In 2002, he decided he wanted to develop a scholastic chess curriculum and pitched his plan to the IU School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation. He was
rejected, so he took his chess curriculum to the School of Continuing Studies, which agreed to allow Volan to teach a one-credit, eight-week class through the University.

“The original goal has always been to work with kids,” Volan said. “I’ve learned so much, and I’ve gotten much better at chess by learning how to teach it.”

Ten years later, Volan is preparing to teach the spring session of COLL-C101: Introduction to Chess in the College of Arts and Sciences. The class is open to 40 students and is offered during the second eight weeks in both the fall and spring semesters.

“When you enroll in the lab, you are enrolling in an in-class chess tournament where you learn to play with a chess clock and how to keep score,” Volan said.

Class enrollment consists of a wide variety of students with different majors and skill sets, Volan said.

Volan said chess is an intellectually stimulating game to learn.

“My students realize they haven’t been fighting each other,” he said. “They have been fighting their own self-doubt, and the person sitting on the other side of the chess board is giving them the opportunity to test their own skills, and that is what it should be all about.”

Volan acknowledged that chess is commonly perceived as a very intimidating game, but he said he hopes his class dispels that stigma.

“It’s fun to learn, and that’s exactly what I’m going for,” he said.