Fury as UK’s only all-female chess team promoted – then told they must recruit a man

The UK’s only all-female chess team have been promoted to the game’s top tier – only to be told they will have to add a man to their squad.She Plays to Win Lionesses A Team have fallen foul of a rule designed to boost female participation in the sport.The Four Nations Chess League (4NCL) requires all of its first division teams to have at least one player of each gender on its roster.This 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’s camaraderie and discourage female participation in the game.The four nations in the 4NCL are England, Wales, Scotland and the Republic of Ireland and there are 12 teams in its first division.Women are now underrepresented at all levels in chess, with only about 11% of top-rated players being female.Lorin D’Costa, who founded She Plays to Win on Zoom during the Covid pandemic, said: “The Lionesses earned promotion the hard way, but now their reward is losing the thing that makes them special.“Not enough girls are playing chess at a young age, and this matters because chess teaches unique strategic skills for life.“Learning these skills can help more girls go on to thrive in the type of strategic roles that end up defining the world of tomorrow – roles that for too long have been dominated by men.“It 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.”While competing in 4NCL’s second division, the team were allowed to field only women as long as they included one player aged under 18.Some players, like Alisha Vyas, 19, joined the team after playing in mixed squads, sometimes as the only woman.“I knew I was only there to fulfil the quota as a woman, and there wasn’t that sense of community,” Vyas said. “Being part of She Plays to Win is amazing – we have team dinners every time, and there’s real camaraderie between the girls.”Emily Maton, 18, said the team had been “promoted on [its] own merit” and should not be compelled to include a male player.“There’s no shortage of male players in the division,” she said. “The whole point of the team is to bring female representation when there isn’t really any at all, and they introduced this rule because there weren’t enough female players.“It’s going against the entirety of the rule and it undermines what we’re trying to do as a team.“The expectations for me were always a lot lower than they were for male players. I’d have coaches say things like: ‘You’re very good for a girl.’“We’ve had people tell us we don’t deserve to be in this division, that we’re not good enough. We got to the top proving everyone wrong – and now this undermines that.”Mike Truran, from 4NCL, said: “Since its inception in 1994 the top division has always been a mixed-team competition, each team requiring a mix of males and females.“We remain the only league in the UK that we are aware of that encourages female participation in chess by requiring mixed teams.“We 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’ opinions change.“There 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.“We 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.”