Chess<\/a> League (4NCL) requires all of its first division teams to have at least one player of each gender on its roster.<\/p>\nThis means She Plays to Win face dropping one of their eight top-level female players to make way for a man. The players have said this would destroy the team\u2019s camaraderie and discourage female participation in the game.<\/p>\n
The four nations in the 4NCL are England, Wales, Scotland and the Republic of Ireland and there are 12 teams in its first division.<\/p>\n
Women are now underrepresented at all levels in chess, with only about 11% of top-rated players being female.<\/p>\n
Lorin D\u2019Costa, who founded She Plays to Win on Zoom during the Covid pandemic, said: \u201cThe Lionesses earned promotion the hard way, but now their reward is losing the thing that makes them special.<\/p>\n
double quotation markWe got to the top proving everyone wrong \u2013 and now this undermines thatEmily Maton<\/p>\n
\u201cNot enough girls are playing chess at a young age, and this matters because chess teaches unique strategic skills for life.<\/p>\n
\u201cLearning these skills can help more girls go on to thrive in the type of strategic roles that end up defining the world of tomorrow \u2013 roles that for too long have been dominated by men.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt takes work to create an environment and sense of community where girls and young women feel that they belong in chess, like our teams in the national league.\u201d<\/p>\n
While competing in 4NCL\u2019s second division, the team were allowed to field only women as long as they included one player aged under 18.<\/p>\n
Some players, like Alisha Vyas, 19, joined the team after playing in mixed squads, sometimes as the only woman.<\/p>\n
\u201cI knew I was only there to fulfil the quota as a woman, and there wasn\u2019t that sense of community,\u201d Vyas said. \u201cBeing part of She Plays to Win is amazing \u2013 we have team dinners every time, and there\u2019s real camaraderie between the girls.\u201d<\/p>\n
Emily Maton, 18, said the team had been \u201cpromoted on [its] own merit\u201d and should not be compelled to include a male player.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s no shortage of male players in the division,\u201d she said. \u201cThe whole point of the team is to bring female representation when there isn\u2019t really any at all, and they introduced this rule because there weren\u2019t enough female players.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s going against the entirety of the rule and it undermines what we\u2019re trying to do as a team.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe expectations for me were always a lot lower than they were for male players. I\u2019d have coaches say things like: \u2018You\u2019re very good for a girl.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve had people tell us we don\u2019t deserve to be in this division, that we\u2019re not good enough. We got to the top proving everyone wrong \u2013 and now this undermines that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mike Truran, from 4NCL, said: \u201cSince its inception in 1994 the top division has always been a mixed-team competition, each team requiring a mix of males and females.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe remain the only league in the UK that we are aware of that encourages female participation in chess by requiring mixed teams.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe surveyed all the team captains during the 2025\/2026 season about whether the rule should be changed; there was no significant appetite on the part of the captains to do so. We remain open to changing the rule in future should captains\u2019 opinions change.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is no evidence that the rule as it stands discourages female participation in chess. Indeed, we believe that by requiring all teams in the top division to have at least one female player we actively encourage female participation in chess.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe believe that changing the rule to one that has no mixed-team requirement at all, such that teams in the top division are not required to include a female player, would serve to actively discourage female participation in chess.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The UK\u2019s only all-female chess team have been promoted to the game\u2019s top tier \u2013 only to be…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":720503,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-720502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/720502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=720502"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/720502\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/720503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=720502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=720502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=720502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}