The 2019 Northern California Scholastic Chess Championships were held the weekend of March 9th & 10th at the Santa Clara convention center. Over 1200 students and more the 50 schools competed in these championships. Mission San Jose Elementary school (MSJE) of Fremont was the big winner in the Elementary School Division. The MSJE team won two major elementary school sections (K-3 & K-6) and Allyson Wong won the overall individual elementary school championship.
The top elementary school section at these championships is the K-6 Championship Division. Allyson scored five wins in six rounds and took the first-place trophy. Other members of the MSJE team were Lucas Jiang (4.5/6) (Lucas and Aditya Arutla (3.5/6) are second graders that “played up” in K-6 to help the K-6 team as we correctly felt we could win K-3 without him) Aghilan Nachiappan (4/6), Jolene Liu (3.5/6) Aditya Sujay. This was the ninth straight year that MSJE has taken home the first place trophy in K-6.
The K-3 Championship section is often called the primary school championship. MSJE finished in first place in this section every year since 2008. In 2019 MSJE once again finished in first place in K-3 Championship. Our K-3 team was led by Jason Liu and Swagatha Selvan, who each scored 4.5/6. Artham Pawar (3.5/6) and Allen Yang (2.5/6) were also top 4 scorers. Arnam Pawar, Thomas Zhang, and Dev Bhatt also competed for our K-3 championship team.
MSJE also did very well in the other sections. Ashwin Jegan, Chet Jayakrishnan, Zahaan Kassamali, Isha Vanungare, Sarvesh Maniv, and Helen Hong competed in K-3 Junior varsity (under 800 rating) and took home the first place team trophy. Prisha Agarwal, Shreeya Hule, Jai Panicker, Ranga Ramanujam, Pranav Rajit, Atharv Jha, Shashwa Manjunath, Edward Zeng, Aashi Gupta, Keerthana Gudi, Shriya Thirumalai, Sunay Rao, Aditya Vanungare, Samuel Montesinos, Nathan Jacob, and Cedric Liu competed for MSJE in the K-3 beginner (under 500 rating) section and took home the first place trophy.
Pranavi Pramod, Saambhavi Karthik, and Nick Jiang competed for MSJE in the kindergarten section. Sanskriti Pandey, Edmund Saroufim, and Kevin Pham competed for MSJE in the K-6 rookie section. Adarsh Swamy, Ashwin Marimuthu, Pratyush Hule, Arnav Gupta, and Dhritee Desai, competed in the K-6 Junior varsity section.
Congratulations to the Chess team for a great showing at the State championships.
MSJE Chess Coaches: Joe Lonsdale, Terry & Cathy Liu, Nachi Aghilan, Chris Torres