Our Team & Mission
About Us
ChessRoster was founded by Colin Scheriff and Tristan Escalada, bringing together decades of software engineering expertise with a deep understanding of the chess community’s needs.
Today, Colin leads ChessRoster’s continued development, building on that foundation to revolutionize chess tournament management through innovative technology and thoughtful design.
Colin Scheriff - Co-Founder & CEO
Colin is an Actuary and financial model developer with over 15 years of experience in full-stack development and high-performance financial modeling. His expertise in building large-scale web applications is complemented by his deep involvement in the chess community, where he has both competed and organized tournaments.
With a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from the University at Albany and a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Montclair State University, Colin has demonstrated his technical leadership at Prudential and John Hancock. His experience with modern web technologies, microservices architecture, and cloud infrastructure brings valuable expertise to ChessRoster’s technical foundation.
As an active member of the chess community — currently serving on the Board of Directors and as Treasurer of the Massachusetts Chess Association — and a USCF-rated player, Colin combines his software engineering expertise with firsthand understanding of tournament organization needs, making him uniquely qualified to develop solutions that serve both organizers and players.
Tristan Escalada - Co-Founder Emeritus
Tristan co-founded ChessRoster and helped shape its early technical foundation, drawing on more than 15 years of software and hardware engineering experience from SparkMeter and other technology companies.
He has since moved on to energy-infrastructure work, helping bring reliable power to communities across the developing world. We’re grateful for his contributions to getting ChessRoster off the ground.
Thad Suits - Founder of SwissSys
For thirty-six years, Thad Suits supported chess tournaments all over the world with SwissSys, the program he created and grew into a trusted standard for Swiss-system pairing.
In passing the baton to ChessRoster, Thad set SwissSys on its next chapter. SwissSys is now integrated with ChessRoster as the hub of a more complete, automated tournament service — and we’re honored to carry his decades of work forward.