Africa-Press – Lesotho. For the first time in the history of Lesotho chess, a 22 year old Lesotho’s current highest ranked chess star, Tokelo Klaas (1827) was recently honored Lesotho’s first Fédération Internationale des Échecs/World Chess Federation (FIDE) Instructor.
Klaas earned himself the recognition after passing a two day trainers’ seminar in Teyateyaneng, Berea under the auspices of FIDE this month. This was the first time Lesotho got a chance to host this kind of workshop and it was facilitated by Geoffrey Borg from Malta who is also FIDE Chief Executive Officer.
Apart from Klaas, there was also Botswana chess player, Tshepo Sitale who also got certified a FIDE Instructor. Again there were other 19 local coaches who got certified as national instructors and development instructors.
Out of the 19, Lesotho also got her first ever women national instructor- Lieketseng Ngatane who was the only women at the workshop. Talking to Informative Sport, Klaas could not hide his happiness as he hopes that will help him influence the development of chess in the country.
Though he is now a certified instructor he disclosed that he will not strictly focus on coaching. “I still want to play a few world chess Olympiads for my country (about 8 to 10).
I am also a university student, so I would like to finish my degree first and then take it from there,” said Klaas. He said he wanted to be a FIDE Master and increase his rank around 2000.
In total, Lesotho now has 23 certified trainers as it already had the CFL acting president Tlhoriso Morienyane and Mokone Moshe as development Instructors while Moseli was the only national instructor the country had.
Chess Federation of Lesotho (CFL), Mr Khiba Selatela congratulated all the titled trainers saying the federations is ready to use them in the district to help in developing the sport.
“Luckily we have people from outside Maseru and we are expecting them to work hard to improve chess in their respective districts. I believe that by the end of this year we will have over 900 new players in chess,” mentioned Selatela.
