The right move

It’s a typical Tuesday at 2 p.m., and students are pouring into the Franklin Chess Center in Meadville, Miss. Most of the kids look a bit worn after a day of elementary school. Shoelaces are loosened, strands of hair fall across their faces. But within minutes, they’re seated around classroom tables with their eyes locked on a wall where a huge chess board and its pieces are projected. Pawn from the E4-square to D5? Or maybe F5? Any earlier distractions are as out of mind as the backpacks they piled up at the center’s entrance. For the next two hours, the only thing that matters is the next move.

Among the young chess players is 8-year-old Emma Nations, Mississippi’s reigning K–3 champ. Round-faced and serious, Nations is an every-afternoon regular here, and she’s fully engaged in the projection, something called “Puzzle Storm.” It’s not long before Nations bounds over to her instructor and whispers a possible solution into his ear. He responds. She grimaces.

In chess, every move has consequences, and Nations knows she will win or lose based on the decisions she makes. That certainty drives this rural chess hub. Wins are earned. Mistakes are exposed. Progress is easy to track.

At a time when many schools are moving away from hard measures of performance, the students at the Franklin Chess Center have thrived by embracing them. And they’ve drawn national attention in the process.

A 2025 REPORT FROM the Thomas B. Fordham Institute found that roughly half of K–12 teachers in the United States say they’ve used at least one form of “equitable” grading. Adoption rates were even higher among middle school teachers and in majority-minority schools. Equitable grading practices include no zeroes, no homework, and unlimited retakes, an approach championed by educational consultant Joe Feldman, author of Grading for Equity. He believes traditional grading practices don’t focus enough on student learning and the mastery of knowledge, and that equitable grading helps reduce barriers and create fairer outcomes for students. Critics argue it lowers expectations for students and hampers teachers’ ability to motivate them. When students receive similar rewards regardless of the quality of their work, it’s harder to make the case that improvement matters. When recognition drifts too far from achievement, complacency and entitlement can follow.

Chess allows for no such ambiguity, and that reality is part of the appeal, especially for Christians. Biblical virtues like excellence and perseverance are prized in chess. In the best chess education environments, character is king.

That’s visible in the score sheets serious chess players use to record games. They log each move in columns for White and Black and circle the final result. The sheets then become instructional feedback, allowing players to examine the game and consider what they did well and what they need to improve. They can even reproduce the game, seeing how changing a move takes it in a whole new direction.

Proponents say that process teaches personal responsibility in a way few other activities do. Additionally, players must raise their hands during tournaments if they have an issue. No adult intervenes on the behalf of students. They must learn to articulate their concerns and advocate for themselves.

Benjamin Franklin would probably like that. His image shows up on the Franklin Chess Center’s signage and sweatshirts, leaving outsiders to wonder whether the program is named after the Founding Father or the county in southwest Mississippi that hosts it. Actually, the county was named long ago in honor of Franklin. It’s a happy providence that Franklin was, in many ways, the first advocate of chess in North America. An avid player himself, he wrote an essay called “The Morals of Chess” that extols the game’s ability to teach foresight, circumspection, and caution. He also detailed its effect on outlook: “We learn by chess the habit of not being discouraged by present bad appearances in the state of our affairs, the habit of hoping for a favorable change, and that of persevering in the search of resources.”

A Franklin poster with curling edges lies on a table next to one of the center’s many chess boards. It bears a less wordy quote, one that students like Emma Nations have evidently taken to heart: “He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else.”

THE HISTORY OF the Franklin Chess Center is closely tied to its founding executive director, Jeff Bulington. Bulington, 60, is a product of Purdue University, where he earned degrees in philosophy and education and a doctorate in curriculum and instruction. He’s tall, with a shock of graying hair, and today he’s wearing a pair of hiking shoes and jeans.

It’s an unassuming look, but Bulington is well known in chess circles. His love for the game came early, when he learned the roles of queens, bishops, rooks, and knights from his first grade teacher. By the time he was 13, Bulington was convinced he could beat anybody. Then he met Earl Raver.

One Sunday after church, Raver stood and announced that it was a nice day for a game of chess. Would someone like to play him?

Bulington says he’d never faced an adult opponent, and he assumed the 50ish “old man” would be another casualty of the winning strategy he’d developed. He was wrong.

“I lost very badly and was embarrassed, but I was also inspired,” Bulington remembers. “I recognized this guy knew something I didn’t know, and I wanted to be a better chess player.” After that, he got his parents to drive him to play Raver and Raver’s chess-playing friends, and he rode his bike when they couldn’t. Right there in a little house across from the only lumber yard in Monon, Ind., Bulington got hooked on chess for good.

About the same time three states south, an entrepreneur 30 years Bulington’s senior was in a small town, too—Meadville, Miss. Wade Creekmore was making a name for himself in the telephone business, and by 1988, he and his brother launched Cellular South, one of the first wireless networks in the nation. The venture was incredibly successful. Decades passed. Creekmore decided he wanted to give back to Meadville.

He heard about a chess program in Memphis that Bulington had started, made a trip there, and liked what he saw. When Creekmore approached Bulington about doing something similar in Mississippi, Bulington assumed the spot under consideration for a chess center was the capital city, Jackson. “I didn’t know Franklin County existed,” he admits.

But it wasn’t long before Bulington would describe Meadville as a gold mine for chess talent. “Bright kids that had not done something like this before, because they’d never seen it as an option. Neither had their parents.”

After teaching chess to city kids in Memphis for 13 years, Bulington signed a 10-year contract to bring his expertise to Franklin County. When the program launched in 2016, Creekmore’s philanthropy, which remained anonymous until his death, provided Bulington with chess gear, a salary, and a travel budget. Travel, Bulington says, is essential for a competitive scholastic program. “Travel is time consuming, energy consuming, and expensive, but players must have opportunities to lose quality games and push forward in their learning.”

The actual center came later: two stories of restored historic space on Meadville’s Main Street, outfitted with tournament tables, computer stations, and bookcases filled with everything from Irving Chernev’s classic Logical Chess to The Queen of Katwe. The dream of a center was born as Bulington enjoyed a cupcake in the spot during its former stint as a deli. He says he “looked around and saw a chess center in it.” In time, Wade Creekmore saw it, too, and sent an architect to meet with Bulington, who says their design plans were informed in part by his admiration of the Saint Louis Chess Club in Missouri.

But during that first year, when there was no center and no plans for one, Bulington met with players in the public schools, a partnership that remains central to the program today. The school district provides transportation to and from the center, and students can choose to incorporate chess into their regular school schedule.

It’s an uncommon arrangement, one made possible by private funding. But Bulington is quick to point out that the school didn’t just allow it. Administrators fostered the chess program as an appreciated part of their culture. “In all the places I’ve taught chess, I’ve never had a school superintendent travel with us on a chess tournament because his children were playing in the tournament.”

Students play chess in thousands of schools across the United States, usually through clubs, enrichment programs, and after-school activities rather than as a formal academic subject. Unlike sports that require expensive equipment or facilities, chess is accessible. A single board can serve dozens of children.

Bulington is for chess in schools, but only if there are enough teachers to do it right. He says the idea that it would be easy to put chess everywhere is false. “It’s a good way for chess to look bad.”

Developing a competitive program from scratch wasn’t easy. Bulington came to Franklin County from a city with a well-developed chess scene, where he could bring in strong adult players from the area to challenge his students. Franklin County had no such network. He was the network.

“It’s exhausting because everybody wants to know, Is this legal? Is this how a knight really moves? Can I castle in this kind of position? The difference between rural chess and urban chess, or even suburban chess, is the availability of players.”

But as he built a program, players came. Once, it was Hungarian-born American chess grandmaster and coach Susan Polgar, who at the age of 15 was the top-ranked female chess player in the world. Polgar took a detour while traveling with her collegiate team to New Orleans for a tournament.

“She just got off I-55 and brought the team here,” Bulington recalls. “I think we had nine grandmasters in the center that day, which was maybe a 10th of the entire grandmaster population at the time in the United States.”

AT THE ENTRANCE to many small towns, a welcome sign boasts about a state football championship or strings of basketball and soccer titles. Meadville’s entrance has something extra. There, to the right of a billboard touting a 1995 football team’s feat, a separate sign celebrates the Franklin Chess Center. State champions 10 years straight, pandemic aside.

The successes came quickly. Only a year and a half after Bulington brought chess to a county half covered by a national forest, the program’s fifth and sixth grade teams finished among the Top 10 in the country, proving country kids could learn chess after all. That same spring, CBS covered the center’s meteoric rise with a feature on 60 Minutes, thrusting Bulington and his players into the national spotlight.

More recently, the Franklin County High School team won the 2022 Mississippi Team Championship with a perfect 4‑0 record, defeating 16 teams statewide. In 2024, the Franklin County Middle School team placed first in the second-tier division at the national K–8 championships in Atlanta. That same year, Franklin Chess Center standout Benson Schexnaydre earned his U.S. Chess Master title—the first Mississippian to reach that status in a long time.

Schexnaydre is now a 20-year-old college student hoping to go to medical school. But in March, he was back at the center, working upstairs with a team preparing for a high school tournament, the kind where games play out in grueling four-hour stretches. Schexnaydre insists competing at that level requires more than mental concentration. “You need to get yourself physically fit to be able to endure it. That’s why I started working out.”

The Franklin County native first came to the center in fourth grade. Chess gave him confidence, he says, and made him feel like he could aim higher for himself. By middle school, he was “full throttle.”

“More than anything, I’ve learned you can’t just work at something. You have to figure out the most efficient and effective way to work at something.”

That mindset paid off when Schexnaydre set his sights on a high ACT score. He made a study schedule, got a prep book, took practice tests, and analyzed his scores. All on his own. And he earned his 30.

Just inside the center, a poster-sized photo shows a younger Schexnaydre and six teammates standing in drizzling rain at a main gate at Harvard University. He’s the one at the far left, wearing rubber boots and a trapper hat. The group made a stop at the campus during their time at the Boston Chess Congress, an annual event.

“Oftentimes for chess tournaments, you fly to a destination, you go to the hotel, and then you’re just locked in a chess bunker for the whole time,” Bulington explains. “We decided that at least once, we would make a point of visiting Harvard and let the children see it.”

Bulington says anonymous benefactor Creekmore stressed that travel is one of the best forms of education, that it’s good to see alternatives to the life that you experience on a daily basis. “Not that you leave yours for that,” Bulington remembers him saying. “Just to know that there are other ways of doing things.”

Creekmore, who died in November at 91, backed his belief with his checkbook.

“I would talk about who was going to a tournament, and he would say, ‘Well, is there anybody else that could go? Is there anybody else that needs to go?”

So they went. Members of the Franklin Chess Center have competed in cities across the country—Dallas, New Orleans, Memphis, Charlotte, Orlando, Philadelphia, Chicago, Albany, Palm Springs, Las Vegas, Niagara Falls.

Bulington recalls a trip to Philadelphia when some of his students overheard people speaking a foreign language. “One of the kids said, ‘That’s what I like about these tournaments.’ And there was this recognition that this is a big world, and I don’t need to be afraid of that. I can interact with it and be expanded by it.”

MONTHS HAVE PASSED since Emma Nations, the program’s third-grade sensation, stood beside Bulington at the center and planned a move on the chess board projection. She spent much of her summer preparing for a national competition in Grand Rapids, Mich., but not under Bulington’s guidance. After the state championships in the spring, with his contract fulfilled, Bulington and his wife moved to Indiana to be closer to family. Before he left, Franklin County honored both the coach and the program he built.

Bulington says he carried a lot of memories with him, but when he reflects on his years in Meadville, he doesn’t think first of the trophies stacked against the center’s front desk. He thinks of simpler things, like a text message he got from a student one evening.

Bulington had searched for just the right chess problem to send her. Not too hard to solve, but intriguing enough to challenge her. He texted it to her mother, and a reply soon came back from the student herself: Thanks for the problem.

“How often do we hear that?” Bulington wonders aloud. “I felt a little bit of a sense of achievement that a child would think of a problem in a positive light, rather than an annoyance.” Bulington says the exchange made him smile.

“Whenever I think of it, I still do.”