Tempo Meets Momentum: Honoring Coach Ayo's Journey With Promoting Queens

August 4th, 2026, at the Jacob Javits Convention Center, NYC. Coach Ayo Osunfuyi standing on stage with an award— a giant chess piece, received from Zeta Charter Schools as the school celebrates everything he has brought to its community.
A picture is worth a thousand words, but in this case, the pictures don’t capture half the story of Coach Ayo Osunfuyi; we may need more than a thousand pages.
Behind this moment are years of sacrifice, commitment, and an unshakable passion for his craft.
This image is no short of striking, one of those rare cases where the picture only tells less than half of the story. Fortunately for us who have worked closely with Coach Ayo and followed his journey, his story is so remarkable we can only tell it too often!

Promoting Queens MOTY

Promoting Queens would be nothing without the amazing and selfless volunteers we are fortunate to have. Our volunteers are the fuel, the engine, and many times, the drivers of our vision. We do not take any of our volunteers for granted, and that’s why we are also celebrating one of ours – Coach Abimbola Ayo Osunfuyi, our Promoting Queens Man of the Year (PQ MOTY).
Coach Ayo is our volunteer of the year. He earned this award for his relentlessness in showing up every day for Promoting Queens. In rooms where Promoting Queens wasn’t mentioned, he made sure our name was heard. His excellence in Project management has also seen him coordinating some of our outreaches, and he’s an excellent collaborator and one who works with excellence as the goal.
Coach Osunfuyi has been with Promoting Queens since its inception. When all we had were dreams and a moodboard, our good Coach and Project Manager did not just sync with our vision; he also ran with it and still runs with it, not just in words, but in execution.
He is also a firm believer that women and girls deserve a seat at the chessboard and in all the big rooms where decisions are made and executed. This also led him to found ChessNCode, fueled by the audacious goal of empowering a million women and girls with digital literacy (tech) and the strategic mindset of chess. The goal is to unlock greater opportunities and employability for women and girls while bolstering lifelong confidence with chess.
He has worn many hats since then, but the constant has always been the same. He shows up, and he builds. Last year, that consistency earned him our Volunteer of the Year recognition, long before Zeta Charter School ever knew his name.

From the Ground Up

Looking at it now, we can connect all the dots, but Coach Osunfuyi did not just emerge by some mysterious happenstance. His journey is an inspiring one, with years where nothing big happened, and now, slowly, things seem to be coming together; we are all experiencing the glam of who he is continually becoming.
All the dots are connecting, from being a chess wunderkind in his teenage years to playing chess professionally and even representing his Country at the Chess Olympiads in 2024, we thought that’s all there is, but Young GM (as he is fondly called in the Nigerian Chess community) is always scheming and always becoming unrelentingly better than he was. You can see his thinkpieces on his Medium.
Long before he became our Project Manager at Promoting Queens, Coach Ayo was simply someone willing to give whatever it took to make things happen. His time, His energy, and His resources, without being asked, so that the work could keep moving forward.
The early, unglamorous parts of building something from nothing rarely make it into a headline, but they are the parts that decide whether an organization survives its first years. Coach Ayo was there for those years, and honestly, we would not be where we are today, and none of the girls we have reached so far would have been reached without him.

Today, he serves as a chess teacher at Zeta Charter School and as Project Manager of Promoting Queens, bringing together his passion for chess, education, and creating opportunity for the next generation. Coach Ayo’s years of consistency have made it possible for him to stand on a stage and be recognized in the first place.

Tempo and Momentum

In chess, tempo is the advantage you gain when every move forces your opponent to respond. It is not enough on its own, as tempo without direction fades. What turns tempo into something lasting is momentum, the sense that each move is building toward something bigger than the last.
Coach Ayo's journey reflects exactly that. Every lesson taught, every student encouraged, every quiet season of work when no one was watching, created an opening for the next opportunity. At Zeta, he is now introducing young students to the game while nurturing what chess builds beyond the board: critical thinking, patience, decision-making, creativity, resilience, and confidence.
And increasingly, that work is creating more space for girls to see themselves in chess.

Building the Future He Always Believed In

Through Promoting Queens, Coach Ayo has spent years contributing to a mission larger than any single classroom, empowering girls and women through chess and creating pathways toward becoming Chess-able, Code-able, and Employable. This is all He hopes to achieve with ChessNCode.
Also, his role at Zeta has given him a new place to carry that vision directly into a school community, but the vision itself is one he helped build from the earliest days of this organization.
That momentum is now taking another step forward with Zeta's first annual Girls Chess Tournament, a new tradition designed to celebrate girls and their participation in the game.
The significance of that tournament goes far beyond one event, it is about building a culture where girls feel encouraged to sit at the board, compete, think boldly, take risks, learn from their mistakes, and see themselves as capable chess players and leaders. It is the same culture Coach Ayo has spent years helping Promoting Queens build, now taking root in a new place.

The Grind and the Glow

The recognition Coach Ayo received at Zeta's Year 9 launch is more than a celebration of what he has already accomplished; it is a testament to a much longer journey, one that began long before that stage and that giant chess piece.
It is a moment where personal history meets purpose, where teaching meets advocacy, and a moment where tempo meets momentum. And where one chessboard, all those years ago, became the starting point for something much bigger than anyone could have predicted at the time.

Here’s a personal message from our Founder, WFM Perpetual, congratulating Coach Ayo and reflecting on everything they have built together
Promoting Queens is proud to celebrate Coach Ayo, not just for this recognition, but for every year of work that made it possible. Thank you for being here from the very beginning, and for continuing to make chess more accessible, more inclusive, and more empowering for the next generation of girls.