Rugged four-hour practices, aggressive recruiting, fierce competition, and the non-stop pursuit of national championships are what you would expect to find on the campuses of college basketball and football powerhouses. But those same elements are in full view at the considerably smaller University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and University of Texas at Dallas, where the world-class chess teams are generating national attention, giving new meaning to sports scholarships, and offering novel ways to recruit high-caliber students.
UMBC and UTD—which have become to college chess what schools such as the University of Southern California and the University of North Carolina have been to football and basketball respectively—offer full scholarships to high-powered chess players, travel the globe to play the competition, and perennially dominate the major chess championships. The stars at these institutions are national and international masters rather than All-American quarterbacks and shooting guards. And a growing number of schools are joining their ranks with an eye to the manifold benefits of fielding an elite chess team.
Over the past two years, UTD has won titles at North America’s two premier chess competitions, the Pan American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship and the more recently established Final Four (which brings together the top four teams in the country). In describing his squad, chess director Tim Stallings sounds more like a big-time football coach setting his sights on the Rose Bowl.
“We have fifteen masters on our team,” he proclaims. “Whereas others can only compete on the top four of five chessboards, nobody else can go down deep like we can. When we play the University of Belgrade and we have 16 boards, that’s like sending four teams.”
UTD’s program—started in 1996—has been able to maintain that advantage with the help of 25 chess scholarships and an aggressive recruiting program. Besides making scholarship offers annually to the winners of both the national and the Texas high school championships, Stallings has recently cast his net as far as the European Youth Tournament, which features the world’s top under-16 chess prodigies. And at the quadrennial Super Nationals, next scheduled for April 2009, Stallings even gives out future scholarships to the winners of the middle and elementary school divisions.
Mind Games
Chess has similarly put UMBC on the collegiate map. “It provided UMBC with an identity at a time it was searching for one,” says associate professor of computer science Alan Sherman, who started the program in 1995 after being snubbed by the school’s athletic department. “We had some negotiations at first,” he recalls. “There were four credit-courses for sports like pocket billiards and archery, but the director of athletics didn’t consider chess a sport.”
Instead, Sherman turned to UMBC’s president Freeman Hrabowski for support, and the chess team has since hung up more major championship banners than any other in the country. “I think it’s one of the best business decisions I’ve made as president here,” says Hrabowski. “We’ve always worked to attract high achieving students, and the chess players helped create a climate that celebrated smart people. Chess was a perfect fit as a symbol for the life of the mind.”
The school offers $200,000 in chess scholarships, including five that supplement free tuition with a $15,000 stipend for housing and food. “The chess team has brought scholars to UMBC who otherwise wouldn’t have come here,” says Sherman. “We’ve had players who turned down Harvard, Yale, and MIT.”
UTD has seen a similar benefit from its chess team. “I would guess they have the highest GPA of any student organization,” observes Michael Coleman, dean of undergraduate education. “Many of them are accomplishing what they do in chess while taking academic overloads and taking fast tracks into graduate programs before their scholarships run out.”
“The mental wherewithal to get to become top level chess players is enormous,” adds UTD’s Stallings. “They have the equivalent of Ph.D.s. They put thousands and thousands of hours into chess by the time they get here, and plenty of time after they arrive. Before each round they know who they are going to play, and they put in hours of study, and then they actually go and play a five- or six-hour game.”
