EPISODE 33: ALbert Bender
Al Bender is an extraordinarily dedicated teacher for Bridge For Youth, a nonprofit organization that promotes youth bridge in the Seattle area. After the pandemic struck, Bridge For Youth and Al switched from a face-to-face teaching model to solely virtual instruction. He caught my attention through this Bridge Winners article on the benefits of teaching online. To say the article brightened my day would be a massive underbid. Read it!
The most important takeaway from Al’s experience is that virtual instruction is an incredibly effective teaching model. We want to see this model duplicated across the country!
Episode Highlights:
2:20- The many flaws of teaching face-to-face
4:25- Advantages to virtual teaching
5:05- Bridge For Youth’s journey in learning how to teach online
7:55- How Bridge For Youth got a staggering 110 students
9:50- Interesting gender discrepancy
12:40- The power of the Shark Teaching Console
“I no longer have to watch my partner make stupid mistakes”
16:10- Testmoz and the allure of competition
18:55- A serendipitous success
20:40- The dedicated student
23:40- Summer camp will be taught by former Setting Trick guest, Tom Carmichael
25:35- Collaboration to on youth tournaments
29:20- SharkBridge is free for teachers who teach youth bridge for free
30:05- Teachers must be good with youths
32:10- Bridge For Youth is in search for teachers!
37:50- The important thing is having FUN!
40:35- A big weakness is the lack of social interactions when using Shark Bridge
45:00- Al warns you to not use the word “kid”
47:00- Al wants to make a difference in his students’ life
Transcript:
John McAllister: Here I have Al Bender. Al Bender is a bridge player and teacher in Seattle, Washington and we've spoken once before. I learned about Al because he wrote an article on Bridge Winners which many of you probably know if you're listening to this. Talking about how COVID has actually been a boon for teaching kids bridge and that frankly is some of the best news that I've gotten since this whole thing happened.
Al Bender: The organization as a non-profit we work for. It has a new name called Bridge For Youth has been teaching bridge to grades 4 through 12 since 2015 so we have quite a few years of experience in trying to teach kids bridge and what works and what doesn't work. The previous teaching model was face-to-face. We would literally get agreement with a school, most often middle schools, and we would assign the teacher and a teacher would go to middle school on a pre-determined day after school as an enrichment program. We would literally load bridge tables into the library or the cafeteria and then give a lesson.
This model was not hugely successful. What are the key problems we had? One, it's enormously difficult to get into a school with the barriers that the school set up are huge. Usually, if we didn't have a bridge playing parent with a child in the school, it never happened. Secondly, when we taught in a school or went to a school, we rarely got enough students to make what I would call critical mass. We would have three, four, five students and so it's a lot of work for a teacher to get in a car and drive there for just a handful of students.
The final problem was somewhat disappointing is that we had no way to continue the kids' education. We would get them for the first semester, by second semester, we had more new kids coming in and when we had the more new kids coming in, we couldn't-- very hard to create a curriculum that would cover both the new kids and the old kids. We tended to get kids for one semester, maybe two semesters and then we would lose them. 12 months ago, along comes COVID, we're not allowed in the school. We had to re-think our model of what we're going to do so we said, "Well, let us teach bridge online."
We knew nothing about teaching bridge online so this was a brand new experience and a learning experience. We're still learning today. Every time we have a class, every time we have a session, we make changes as we get better. The first class I call, I tell the kids they were our tester pancakes. They were what we tried first and learned from and decided how to change. The online model has a number of very key advantages compared to the problems I mentioned. One, the schools don't care. There's no requirement to get any school permission to do an online model. We have no hurdle to get over a school.
Secondly, we aggregate kids from a lot of schools so we don't need to have critical mass. One major school, we have one kid. That's fine. He goes on without-- we are able to aggregate kids from all over the State of Washington. This is what we're doing. Thirdly, we group kids by skills, not by school. It's not school-specific. We have a class which is what we call basic bridge. This is a beginner class. When the kids complete their basic bridge class, we have the next class which we call an improver class. After they get to a level of skills, we have a third class which we call our advanced class.
After the advanced class gets really strong and capable students, we then match them up with adult mentors and take them into a mentoring program. We are now able to engage kids from fourth grade through twelfth grade and keep them learning and active the whole time. That's what's happening. Then we didn't learn a whole lot so we did our first online session starting June 30th of last year. This was over the summer. We had run a 12 week class of both bidding and play. We had approximately 21 students register for that class. It was probably somewhat an anomaly because there was no summer camps, nothing was going on so the students were looking for something to do.
The model or the teaching technique we use is we did bidding first and then play the hand. Then we had 50% attrition so we were learning the process. Then we started a second class in September. We had about 32 students signed up, this would be the first semester. Again, same teaching model of bidding first and then play the hand second. The reason I mentioned that is because bidding is boring to those students whereas play the hand is a lot more fun, more fun than you and I would probably think it is but it is fun to them.
We analyze everything we're doing and the other problem we had after the first two sessions, the 12 weeks was not enough. The students weren't coming out of 12- week sessions with enough skills to move to the improver class. They just were not there yet so once again we re-thought our model and we did two things. One, we start with play the hand first which is actually pretty easy because we used the Shark Bridge platform and we can pre-set the contracts so that when we give the students hands to play, it's a three no-trump contract. When they get it the lead is on the table and then they get to play out the hand they don't have to-- not worry about how they bid it.
We do play the hand first and then we've had two sessions so effect of that has been we have much less attrition. The two classes we're doing, to play the hand first are ongoing. We have not finished to play the hand yet so we haven't started the bidding so I don't know how it's going to progress as we go into the bidding. We had started two sessions in January this year and we recruited an amazing 110 students for these two sessions. You might say, "How was that possible?"
John: How many kids did you have in the program when you were doing schools?
Al: On the schools, any given time we had maximum of 40-50 and part of that, there was a Northwest Chinese School that we taught on Saturday mornings and the Northwest Chinese School would contribute as much as 24 students so we got a lot of students from one program from the Chinese community in the Greater Seattle area. We have a certain set of unique circumstances in the Seattle area that other play areas might have but they do not have to the same degree. We have a number of platforms for recruiting that are online.
A large number of the schools and this state and all up and down the East, West Coast use a flyer system called Peachjar, P-E-A-C-H-J-A-R. It's a website and providers can present a flyer. A particular flyer. I use Canva, it's a free site for creating a flyer and you can present a flyer to a specific school like we tend to select middle schools as our starting point and sometimes high schools. If the flyer gets approved which it almost always does, it's sent out to every parent in the school because they're all subscribers. We reach 100% of the parents of the schools.
The ability to recruit that way is tremendous because before that, we would literally go to the school and set up a table at lunch hour with some poster boards and we'd go around pass out flyers and try to attract students with modest success. One of the very unusual aspects of the online model in terms of recruiting in the face-to-face model, we recruited 100% boys. 100. Every single student was a boy. With the online model, at least 50% if not more are girls-
John: Wow.
Al: -and that is interesting. I said, "You have on your site, you had a discussion with the woman from the UK that studies bridge at the university level." I can't remember the name of the-- yes Samantha. I asked her about it and she said that it's a very interesting phenomenon. Believe that has to do with girls being intimidated by the boys at that age group. The online is far less threatening to them so we have a lot of girls and the girls are great at playing bridge. They're probably better mental readiness than some of the boys that we have in the class. That is interesting.
We have the Peachjar. Within our area, there are in the order of 1,000, 2,000 schools that subscribe to Peachjar. Unfortunately, the two biggest metropolitan areas Seattle and Bellevue do not so we have a hard time reaching those two districts. The other platform we have-- is there a platform here in the Seattle area's headquarters is 6crickets and they're up and down the West Coast.
I think they're expanding East and the 6crickets is a marker place for youth activities. Heavily focused on camps, but other programs for Richmond and after school, or if you go to 6crickets, you will see 500 different programs being offered from chess to guitar lessons, to coding, all sorts of opportunities and then lots and lots of summer camps. The 6crickets has associated a fee with it that we have to pay, but we just look at a cost of recruiting a student.
By the way, Peachjar does charge a fee for the flyers. However, if you're a non-profit and you offer the program for free, we given the opportunity to submit 25 flyers per month at no charge. That's a big savings because normally it's about $500 per 25 schools or 20 schools, $500 we're trying-- but we're a non-profit. We don't have a lot of money so we use the free flyer system for doing the online.
The other aspect of the online model is that in the time frame we started this in August of last year, we started our first class the end of June, but in August last year, a new teaching platform came online, called the Shark teaching console, S-H-A-R-K, Shark. The Shark teaching console changes the whole dynamics of the teaching bridge. In fact, to the extent, even if I go back to a face-to-face model, I would want every student to have some type of a laptop or an iPad or whatever they would have. I would still teach using a Shark. What you say, why Shark? Shark enables us to preset hands that reinforced the lesson.
Shark also enables us to sit every student in a single-seat, usually South for us, and they play with three robots. If the lesson hand, as I'm planning out a no trump hand, every student is playing the same hand. No student is sitting East or West being
defenders, throwing the useless cars because it has started defense lesson and no student is sitting there playing dummy. In fact, one of the young girls that was in my class, we were using necessarily using Bridge Base and we switched to Shark. She just blurt it out in the middle of the class, "I love this. I no longer have to watch my partner make stupid mistakes."
John: I do want you to tell me the name of this young woman, just to track her, but to follow her bridge career.
Al: She has the potential will be a bridge star, but I won't give any names out. In the face-to-face model, we would maybe do four hands and they would declare one hand to the class level lesson and that would be the end of it. This way, every student plays every hand and the Shark console gives us a teaching table. After the students play out the hands, I am able then to reset the hand and I used it as a teaching table, or I can play out the hand to show them how it should be done and the cards will show up at every table so they can watch the cards. I basically show all four hands.
I can tell them what I'm thinking and what I'm worried about and they get to see the complete play every person is sitting at a table with instruction. The learning that they achieve using this platform is tremendous. We create the hands that we say with their hands are PBN files. We create the hands. If there are no trump hands are all no trump hands. If there's trump hands are all trump hands. They all have a particular lesson. We might have a lesson on ruffing losers in the dummy, which is this week's lesson, by the way, and so the hands are ruffing losers in the dummy. Every student, they get to do it over and over and over again. The way it is--
John: All that it loaded into Shark like once you have it loaded into your Shark, are you then able to access it?
Al: Yes. The way we work as an organization, since we have multiple teachers, we use Google Drive. We have a folder for curriculum. Lesson six is ruffing losers in the dummy. The lesson is uploaded, which is a Word file to start with or we change it to a PDF before we send it to the students. We have PBN hands that we have so any teacher can upload it to Shark and we can edit them or change them if we find an error.
The last thing we added, just this session that we've been doing as a way to help the learning and teaching, because a lot of the core concepts are very difficult for the students is sending the students drills. We create drills, D-R-I-L-L, that's really a test, but we don't want to call it a test because the students don't want any more tests than they already have so it's a drill. The drill is we use a program online called Testmoz, T-E S-T-M-O-Z and we create the drill in an Excel file and we upload that file into Testmoz and it shows up as basically problem has, I give a North hand, the South hand, I provide a lead and then the questions are asked.
What car do you play first? Do you pull trump first? If not, why? And so there was a list of five or six questions for every hand that reinforces the lesson and it's effectively for all practical purposes, homework. To motivate the students to do the homework, I maintain a leaderboard because you get a score from Testmoz. Every score is entered into a leaderboard. I send out the leaderboard several times a week to the students so they can see where they stand with their peers.
That's to my surprise, which you wouldn't think a leaderboard would be as motivating as a gift certificate to Amazon or something like that but every time I sent out the leaderboard, I got four or five students taking the drill because they don't like where they are at the leaderboard. It is a motivation for them to take the drills and the drills, I don't care if they get the answers right or wrong, it's just the practice and the exercises. We are now six lessons into this new curriculum, I said before, the first curriculum was 12 weeks. We now have changed it to 20 weeks. The 20 weeks is to try to get deeper and more depth of knowledge for the students.
We have eight weeks of play of the hand, eight weeks of bidding, and then the last four weeks, are defense. We have yet to get past week six but we're expecting that we will have a much more success. In terms of attrition, just as were talking about, we started with 110 students that registered the first week and we had two classes, one on Monday and one on Thursday. The first week, 101 showed up, 9 never came. It's a free program so there's not a lot of motivation to have to come to the program.
We have been having attrition along the way. We are currently getting about 35 students per class, maybe as many as 38, sometimes as few as 28 but we run about 70 students that at this point are pretty hardcore. We run a class on Monday and a class on Thursday, just because we had to split it up. There were so many to start with. There's no way a teacher could handle the group. It turned out that that was another, what would call it? Serendipity success in that many students in the course of the initial classes had to shift for one reason or another.
They had a conflict or they couldn't make a class on Monday because they had a doctor appointment so they'll sit on the class on Thursday because bridges tumult took knowledge. If you miss a class that gets hard. If you miss two classes, as almost certain, you're going to drop out. Having the way for the students to be able to catch up with the two classes per week has really reduced the overall attrition of the program and I think that has been successful. Now, the Monday class is ahead of the Thursday class.
The Monday students, they know what they're going to miss that can take Thursday, the Thursday class needs to know ahead of time. They're going to miss to join the Monday class that they're not as good and taking the Monday class when they miss a Thursday class, but we've had, for example, one student wasn't on the Thursday class and he got selected to be in the boy's choir on Thursdays. He switched to the middle to the Monday class. He could continue bridge and continue the boy's choir.
The story you, you like stories that young girl who said she loves, the Shark Bridge. I said the comment, I got an email from her parents the other day, they had gone out to the mountains where there's snow, [unintelligible 00:19:24] that's the outfit to go ski that the intermediate class she's in is on Wednesdays. She mandated, they get to the rental house by four o'clock so she wouldn't miss class. I thought that was wonderful. I have these little stories to tell. Her parents thought that was a museum enough to share it with me. She is at this particular young girl is very math-centric.
She was a chess player or is a chess player, not was a chess player so bridge is very in line with her skills and her disposition. She's a good match for.
John: How old is she?
Al: She is 12. We have students as young as eight, we have one seven years old. The seven-year-old is actually doing very well. We have students as young as eight. Well, the last recruiting that we did, I forgot to mention this. What I did we get 110 kids at one time. We had the opportunity and there are around the country, what are called Parent Associations for Gifted Students. In some places, they are called QUEST. There are other organizations but in the case of the state, in our area. One of them is the Lake Washington School District, gifted, educated association, or something like GEAC.
We were asked by them, they saw the fire that came to the one of the schools and asked if we would host a bridge tasting program for their families, which we did do using Shark. We created just four hands, two no-trump hands, no dummy. Basically, everyone sits at a table and just throws cards, high trick wins, and then two hands again, no dummy, but with a trump suit. There was no dummies, and we would preset the contract that one no trump or one heart. We would sit them at a table and every one four to a table and they would get just to throw cards on the table, win tricks.
We had 82 students show up, 82 with their parents. We was scheduled for an hour, I had extra hands, thank God, because, after the four hands, which was at an hour point, they says "Can we do more? Can we do more?" We did several more, went for an hour and a half. Out of those 82, we have 40 to 50 students that registered. The gifted students are a group of students whose skills match the difficulty and challenges of learning bridge. We are now reaching out to other gifted programs under the Washington State area to use them as a recruiting tool.
Besides the teaching program, we also do summer camp. We are right now planning summer camp this year. Last year, we did the online summer camp. We had 38 students sign up for online summer camp last year. This year we're expanding, we are going to do more programs. We actually have a bridge pro who's agreed to teach the advanced players, is coming in for us. We're trying to make it a more-
John: [crosstalk] Tom Carmichael?
Al: Carmichael yes, Tom Carmichael.
John: He was guest on the setting trick.
Al: What?
John: Tom was a recent guest on [crosstalk]
Al: Oh, okay, yes. Tom is going to be teaching the advanced students. We are going to do a one-week bridge tasting session. We're going to do a two-week, what we're calling boot camp, where I give them the 20 lessons semester course in two weeks. Two lessons a day for 10 days. Basically, do the complete semester course in two weeks. We're calling it boot camp because it's going to be a lot of work. It's going to
be like military training. We'll see if we get any students registering for it. That's our plan.
The summer camp where we focus the teaching, basically, the Washington State and the District 19 area, the summer camp, we open to the whole country. Last year, we have students from New Orleans, Trenton, New Jersey, Chicago. The one thing we do offer for students who come to summer camp. If they enter our program through summer camp, which is fee-based, we do charge for summer camp. They are allowed to join our weekly lessons afterwards, which are free. We have some of our last year's summer camp students, our regular members at our lessons.
We also run quarterly youth tournaments. Now, the interesting part is we've run the youth tournament only for ourselves, we are now getting to where we're going to be joining forces with an East Coast youth bridge group. We're going to invite each other, to each other's tournaments. They ran their tournaments at 10:00 in the morning, which is 7:00 AM for us, which is unacceptable. Now, we run our tournaments at seven o'clock at night, which is 10:00 PM for them, which is unacceptable.
We've been in discussion, so they're going to run their tournaments at 1:00 so we can come in at 10:00. We're going to run our tournaments at 10:00 so they can come in at 1:00. We can combine the students from two major youth organizations. I have talked a whole lot but--
John: You are able. I mean, yes, I don't mean to-- [chuckles] You are really carrying the mail here.
Al: Okay.
John: I have questions-
Al: Go ahead.
John: -which are going to require you to speak more. I noticed that you've changed the name of the organization to Bridge for Youth from Seattle NextGenBridge.
Al: Correct.
John: One of the things that I'm sitting over here wondering is, why can't we just offer this program to the entire United States? Because I'd like to duplicate what you're doing. I live in Virginia. I would like to duplicate what you're doing here in Virginia. It seems like there's a way we could do it. You had this taster session, you had 80 some people at it. How many people did you have? Did you have a table monitor at every table for the taster session?
Al: No, we just had one other teacher because it's all on Shark. You can't have table monitors on Shark. We don't use table monitors in this teaching model, which makes it very scalable. We do use table monitors at tournaments, but not in the teaching because there's only one student per table so there's nothing they could be doing to harass each other, other than harassing the--
John: Oh, so you're saying that all 84 people on the taster session were all at their own Shark consoles?
Al: They were in the tasting menu, I put four per table, I let them play together, but when we teach, it's only one per table, that's how we do that. In terms of the session, so I am having a call afterwards from Reese Koppel, you know, Reese?
John: I know of him.
Al: Reese Koppel is been chartered by the ACBL Education Foundation, which is not associated with SBO. It uses the name or somewhat use that and the SBO Education Foundation, he's been chartered to come up with a teaching model or whatever. I'm going to have a call with him, after I call with you. One of the things he's asking is whether or not we would share our curriculum, with other areas so they could duplicate this program. I don't know the answer to that, because we have a board of directors and we would have to ask the board.
There is nothing saying that-- We have done a ton of work, in terms of creating these lessons. The lessons have everything a teacher needs, they can certainly go and hone them themselves and change them or edit them. We have a complete teaching program that is online that can be shared to any organization that wants to teach. The only requirement is that you have teachers that are skilled, they will need to be trained on how to use the Shark platform the way we used Zoom. You need a Zoom pro account that's because we want our classes an hour and a half and the free account always 40 minutes.
Shark also charges per student $1 per hour but what they have agreed to do, if we are offering the program for free to students, they give us the service for free. We're a nonprofit, the amount of dollars we have are nickels and dimes. Everything we can do to have a free program is to keep the cost down are very important to us. We, as a board, have not specifically-- We were actually going to address the Reese Koppel's request for the lessons, at our next board meeting and my call with Reese's to find out what he wants with them or what he's going to do with them, how he's going to use them.
Back to your original question, it would be very easy to start up this program using our materials, you would only need trained teachers and the teaching skills as they don't need to be the best bridge players, they need to be good with kids. You can't talk down to them. In fact, some of our best teachers are teachers and they teach kids math or science or some other tough topic and happened to be bridge players. They are very good with the students. That's important. We've had one teacher that is very good bridge player but he just was not the right touchy-feely skills for the students. He did not do well.
Our biggest problem from scaling, by the way, is we can't get enough teachers, teachers are hard. Back to you, I'll ask you a question. Why can't we get teachers from all over the country, teaching other programs? In other words, why can't we have a teacher in Virginia teaching a program in Seattle or in Seattle teaching in Virginia?
John: Yes, that's a good question. How many people do you have in front of the Monday night class, teaching?
Al: Right now, we have four teachers and one teacher assistant. I teach Monday and we have this, with us assistant. We have another teacher who teaches Thursday with an assistant. We have a third teacher that teaches the improver class with the same assistant so this assistant goes to all three classes. Then we have a fourth teacher that teaches on the Wednesday, also same time frame, the advanced class, and these are dedicated students. They come every single week. They don't miss a class, the improvers and the advanced. Our last class has eight students that come every single week and our improver class has 18 that come every single week.
We will be graduating in May, 60. We are struggling now, how are we going to handle 60 new kids into the improver class, that is what we're worried about. We're trying to recruit teachers to help so we can have more than one improver class to handle those 60 graduates. Again, scaling this program is somewhat a function of our ability to get teachers and we are out scrounging around trying to find additional teachers for this program. Anything you can do through your webcast for, to get teachers would be wonderful.
John: How long is the class on Monday and Thursday night? Al: Hour-and-a-half.
John: You teach just one of the two classes?
Al: I teach the Monday class. We have a separate teacher that teaches the Thursday class, but I have been known to teach two classes a week. I'm retired so I certainly have the time, but I want to keep as many teachers engaged as possible. I'm also the treasurer of the organization. I do all the promotion for the classes, I'm doing promotion for the summer camps. There was a lot of activities that are ongoing.
John: How many hours a week you think you're working on this program?
Al: That's really not fair. I create, my Thursday partner creates half the lessons, and I create half the lessons, but I probably put in the order of 20 hours of preparation for the lessons. If I'm doing four lessons, that's 80 hours of, I actually doing more than my fair share because he doesn't have the same amount of time I have and I have to take the agreed to take out some of the burden from him so I haven't doing any less.
The hardest part of the lesson is not the PowerPoint or the whiteboard session, what I call, our whiteboard sessions are 10 minutes or 10 or 15 minutes fast. Our teaching method is teaching by doing, not teaching by talking. The whiteboard time that takes us creating the hands. Every hand is customed designed to teach the lesson we're trying to teach. I don't necessarily create the hand all myself. Some I do, some I modify, but there are no hands from Larry Cohen, other hands I have taken free liberty. I take anything that's on the web. I'm taking free liberty to use.
I searched the web for hands that are meaningful. I get the hands from the newspaper every day. There's sometimes wonderful hands for the students that I
then just convert to a PBN file that, oh, there was one this week on the ruffing and discarding. I then just copy it into the PBN file, but getting the hands is the hard part. The drills are enormously difficult to create. As basically an HTML language you have to use. I don't know, HTML language. My Thursday teacher does know HTML language and he has given me a template that I use and I just changed the cards of the hands and changed the questions but it's still very, very difficult to create the drills, but once they're done, then you're just doing the teaching.
It's a matter of how many sessions a week you do. In terms of giving up the lessons, we are probably get me up if we were to give them away. We're probably giving away tens of thousands of dollars of value. Not that we specifically are looking for tens of thousands. I was just saying that's what would be offered to other areas should they use the lessons?
John: Why is it too many kids to have on one night? Because the kids are from our previous conversation, they're all on Zoom with you and you're giving them the PowerPoint, but are they asking questions in the chat or--
Al: No, okay. The students are pretty shy. They don't ask a lot of questions, even though they're getting a little bit more active now, they're getting to know us so they're asking many more questions.
John: I'm glad to hear that.
Al: Shark, the max I can handle is about 40 table so you have to understand the Shark platform. I literally see every table. I have the teacher screen so I see 40 tables on my screen. I have my large monitor and I look at every table and I watched the progress of every student or try to watch the progress and much more than 40, 45 is enormously difficult. The student might say, "Oh, I made a mistake, can I go back a trick?" And I can run them back trick then I have to say, "What table are you at?" I have to go to table one and back them up.
Initially I did in the first couple of weeks of 50 tables, 55 tables as hard, I'm actually now down to mid-30s. Mid-30s is very doable. That's really a function of being able to watch all the tables.
John: That's the bottleneck is that you can only watch so many tables on Shark yourself and be a good administrator of the Shark platform.
Al: Correct. Even though the Shark platform could handle up to 200 kids. If we just do it to the numbers, play out the hand, here's how the play, I can't answer questions. I can't do resets. I can't watch the hands. I could do more, but we try to provide an experience that the students enjoy. Some of the things they like tell me, for example, they will play out a hand and they will say, "I took eight tricks, I took seven tricks," and they want to announce the tricks they took. I would have to say, eight tricks were the sure winners you had, the challenge that define the ninth trick and you didn't find the nine trick, but I'm going to show you how to find the ninth trick.
John: They're saying that in Zoom, like their audio.
Al: Yes, on the audio from Zoom. They liked doing that. That's a lot of fun for them to announce their number of tricks they took and it's amazing. They have so much fun and they're so bad at it, but I will get this. When I was much, much younger and I had young children, I taught soccer and one of the students were eight years old in the soccer. They would all gather around the ball and the coaches would yell, "Play your position, play your positions." They all gathered around the ball. Then they gain difference to what you said.
By age nine, they still gathered around the board, maybe one person, but as they got to be 10 and 12 or 11 and 12, they start playing positions. Bridge is the same thing. Ladies are 8, 9, 10-year-old students. They worry a game. They'll get better. If they stick with it, they'll get better every year. They don't have to figure it all out and get it right the first time. We don't really care if they play it right. We just care that they're having fun and the major goal of our whole program is fun first. That was the problem with the one teacher I mentioned that was didn't do well is, it wasn't about fun for him. It was about doing it right.
John: Yes, I believe it, I've been that guy. Al: You've been that guy oh, well.
John: Yes, for sure.
Al: I'm sorry to hear this.
John: I've definitely been that guy. I continue to be that guy sometimes. How did you find out about Shark Bridge? Because Shark Bridge seems to be a big part of the revelation here.
Al: One of our other teachers, the person who teaches the intermediate class somehow got wind of it. He went to a training session and he came back and announced that this is something we really need to look at and we all jumped on Shark and I was using Shark before it went live. We use Shark for last year was Bridgehampton in August. They would then go live until September so we were a beta site for them. ACBL has adopted. ACBL has been pushing. They've been doing training session. You can get Shark's certifications on ACBL now the fact that I'm up on getting so ACBL believes that this is the right teaching platform also. Reese Koppel, by the way, he was the one who wrote the program, Tricky Bridge, everywhere. Are you aware about Tricky Bridge?
John: He didn't write the program but he's involved, I think.
Al: Okay, all right, so I may be wrong. He did as his niece or daughter or niece took our camp last year. Caroline Koppel was in our cabinet and she lives in New Orleans so she has--
John: Maybe she was a sister because I think Reese is in college.
Al: It could have been his sister, Caroline was about 16, so it could have been a
sister.
John: I think he's in college at Yale. We interviewed the founder of Tricky Bridge is a guy named Scott.
Al: I learned something too.
John: The kids are not interacting really with each other. It's interacting with Shark. Do you think that that's a weakness in the program that they're not able to get to know each other?
Al: Absolutely, bridge is a social game. I actually played chess when I was young and changed over to bridge somewhere along the way and you would think that chess and bridge provide the same mental challenge or somewhere, but the bridge would provide a social aspect that you don't get with chess. The social aspect is important and they're not getting the social aspect even when we have tournaments, there's not much of a social aspect in the tournaments. That is a negative, nothing that I can see how to handle that.
Let's say we get to a point where I can do face-to-face camp again so all the students come to a location that we find, that we can rent and they come out in there and they can interact and go out and run around a bit in the middle of the day. Regardless, I would still use a Shark Bridge to teach them because it's a better teaching method. They could all sit at the same table and they would all be sitting south, as far as I'm concerned.
John: It seems like once you get that in person, you're going to have all these kids, 70 kids let's say that are going to have learned the basics. Once you get them together, in some way, that seems like there's going to be an explosive because then they're like, "Oh, we should play together on bridge." When they start playing together and getting together online, I think that's going to--
Al: Our advanced students play online all the time. They play tournaments, they play ACBL tournaments. They play regional tournaments online. They are pretty dedicated students. The intermediate, the improvers, not so much, even though we also run a Sunday fun bridge. Everyone comes onto BBO and we just set up tables. We have table monitors and they just play bridge. We get about three tables a week doing that and potentially more as we graduate these students.
If we have enough students, our local Seattle bridge unit, when they run a sectional, they will do a youth section. They'll have a Saturday or a Sunday youth section that we will have, and we might be able to get as many as 40, 50, 60 kids at a youth session. We're building up a base of students that will be ready to go to the next tournament when we have one.
John: How come you changed the name?
Al: That's a good question. In reality, we didn't specifically change the name. We merged two organizations. We had two organizations in Seattle, the Seattle NextGenBridge, and Bridge for Youth. The Seattle NextGenBridge taught the online lessons, weekly lessons, and they also ran the tournaments. The Bridge for Youth ran the summer camp and the University of Washington Husky Bridge Club. They were two separate organizations. The biggest expense a nonprofit has is insurance.
We spend $1,700 a year on insurance. Bridge for Youth spends $1,700 on insurance.
It just didn't make sense to have two organizations servicing the same group. Board members of Bridge for Youth were on the board of-- We were doing both jobs. This year there was a discussion as to why don't we merge the two organizations? We literally have just completed the merger of the two organizations. There was a committee and they put together new bylaws. They had to come up with the name and the decision of the committee was that they liked The Bridge for Youth name, so we kept The Bridge for Youth name. That's how it happened. It's basically the outcome of a merger of two organizations.
We also merged the board of directors. We have board members from both organizations, previous organizations in the new board. We used to have a nine- person board, now we have an 11-person board that is servicing all the youth activities in this area. I believe having two separate organizations was diluting the resources. It's better to have one organization to focus all the resources on the students. I realize I've used the word kids multiple times. We're not allowed to use the word "kids". It's demeaning. We're supposed to use "students" or "youth". I'm just warning you there.
John: There you go. There's this podcast editing platform called Descript where you can actually change the words. You can use the person's name and change the words. We could potentially change all of those references. I don't know. I'm not going to promise that.
Al: You don't have to. It will survive. How many people listen to your podcasts?
John: Typically, an episode will get about 500 downloads on average. Some have been downloaded as many as maybe 1,800, 1,900. Gavin Wolpert's our first one, so that's the most downloaded one. It's not quite at 2,000 the last time I looked. Well, Bridge Winners, we've published a lot of the episodes on Bridge Winners. I've shared the episodes with non-bridge players, and they've said that it goes over their head. They don't really understand it. We're not really catering to non-bridge players, frankly. It'd be nice if they were interested, but it's hasn't really been the goal. I got in touch with you, Al.
I learned about you on Bridge Winners and then I reached out to you and Bridge Winners and you got right back to me. If anybody listening, they can reach out to you on Bridge Winners. I'd say that's a good way to get in touch with you if they have questions about what you're doing.
Al: That's fine. I share with Bridge Winners partly because you asked the question why isn't this duplicated? I would like to see it duplicated.
John: Absolutely.
Al: I would like to see 2,000 students in classes every day. John: That would be fantastic. That gives me some chills, bud.
Al: Probably if this is just getting towards the end of this conversation, I enjoy teaching the children and it's fun. I'm hoping that I am able to make the difference in some student's life. For whatever reason, in my own background, I had one teacher that directed me towards a university that I probably would not have gone to which I ended up attending which changed my life. That was his alma mater. I'm hoping I can make a difference. We have some students that have disabilities, even learning disabilities. If we can give them a platform that they can help express themselves, then we're making a difference. That is all I can hope for. That's fun if we can make a difference.
I don't think we're going to necessarily create the next world champions, but we might. I didn't mention, one of our students aged 10 qualified for the US World Championship team for the age group 10 to 16 at age 10. He's now age 11. He's still on the 10 to 16 age group. He's an amazing student. He started playing at age eight, and I can't even begin to tell you how fast he has learned the game. We have two students called The He Brothers, Eddie and, I am going to say Edward and Eddie, because [unintelligible 00:47:00] could be their brothers. They routinely win tournaments. They're both 12 or 13, maybe 13 by now.
John: Are all these kids in the advanced class?
Al: Yes, they're in the advanced class. Arthur, who's on the world team, he has a coach and he's on a team. He doesn't take our classes anymore. They have ACBL coaches over there.
John: The USBF Junior Program is the program you're talking about.
Al: Right. They match them up with a partner from Boston. He has a Boston partner that he met for the first time when he went to Atlanta last year to qualify for the world championship. He did qualify. We were cheering in the stands here in Seattle for Arthur. Did a great job.
John: Well, Al, I tell you, man, you have really done a great job of wrapping this up. I love that you see this as an opportunity to be of service, and you're really doing it, so hats off to you.
Al: Right. Thank you for the opportunity to tell us about our program. Hopefully, others that listen to this might think about trying to duplicate it.
John: Absolutely. Amen. Thank you so much, Al.