It’s a small technicality but only the winners of the Championship sections are declared “National Champions”. Cahree performed excellently and scored a perfect 7/7 in the K8 U1000 section. He’s definitely a chess champion, and looking at all the other stuff he has on his resume an all around good guy, but he doesn’t quite yet qualify as Baltimore’s first “national” chess champion.
NPR picked up this story, too. Someone’s running a good chess program with very good PR. Good for them!
Seems I wasn’t the only one to pick up on this slight inaccuracy…
As is generally the case, the more you know about a story the more errors you will spot in the media coverage of it. That’s been the case with nearly every media story I’ve read or seen on chess.