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Chess Masters at UT-Brownsville

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Bachmann has since adjusted nicely, embracing the freedom that all 18-year-olds away from home for the first time relish, and is now the top player on a UTB chess team that boasts a high-octane roster of international players. Of the 12 team members, seven come from Mexico or South American countries while all but one of the remaining players hail from Brownsville. With the exception of Fernandez, who is an International Master, only the foreign students have the impressive and difficult-to-earn chess titles.

"Now it is true that the Brownsville kids have been doing very well and winning national championships," says Harwood, "but most of the success has been at the lower age groups and in the elementary schools. But as the kids got older, they would plateau out. And for a top-notch college team, there's a big difference between where these kids are rated and where the top college teams' players are rated. And even with great coaching and doing nothing but training chess all day every day, it would be almost impossible to make up the gap with just local players. So, it was obvious to me that if we wanted a shot at the Final Four, we needed outside players."

One of the first keys to successful recruiting, as anyone in college sports will attest, is having a good coach. So, in September 2006 Harwood hired Gilberto Hernandez. Most people may never have heard of him, but if you play chess, particularly in a Spanish-speaking country, odds are you have.

Hernandez, of Mexico, earned the title of Grand Master at 25 and has been his country's top player for all but one of the last 12 years. In Mexico, he is the Michael Jordan of chess. During that time, he made his living as a professional chess player, residing in Spain and Argentina. Hernandez happened to be in Chicago playing a tournament in 2006 when Harwood persuaded him to swing by the university on his return to Mexico.

Hernandez says one of the draws for him to coach at UTB was the fact that it was so near in geography and culture to his own country, meaning the shock of moving to America would be minimal. After all, most Brownsville residents are Hispanic or of Hispanic descent and a majority of the population speaks Spanish. This fact has also greatly helped bring in top international players from Spanish-­speaking countries.

"It makes it much easier for me to come here," says Nadya Ortiz, a Women's International Master from Colombia. "It makes it much more comfortable."

Another plus in having a famous Hispanic coach is that he understands the natural instincts and rhythms of his players and how they came to and approach the game of chess.

"To be Latin American," says Hernandez, "if you are a good player it is because you have talent. We don't have the knowledge and coaching of many Russian people, for example, who work with Grand Masters since they are children. As for how we play, I think we take more risks. Latin American instincts are to go for more."

Hernandez coaches in English in an attempt to help his kids learn the language, but he and his players often slip into their native tongue when dissecting the finer intricacies of the chessboard.

Further making the team unique is the emphasis Harwood places on recruiting female players in a sport dominated by men. At the 2007 championship tournament, UTB's "A" squad, composed of four players, boasted two women. No other foursome in the field could say the same.

"One of the things I noticed was that in elementary school, half the players were girls," says Harwood, " but as they got older we'd lose about 80 to 90 percent of them. I really wanted to try and recruit some female players, thinking it might help encourage the female players at the scholastic level if we had some on our team as role models."

Harwood says he does not envision a time when the team will be entirely built of international players; he wants the local kids who love to play to feel they will always have a home at UTB. But the future, he says, is based south of the border.

There is an inescapable irony in the fact that the school with the team that is knocking academic giants off their gilded pedestals by using the talents of Hispanic international students is smack in the middle of the ­border-fence controversy.

In February, the Department of Homeland Security filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking access to the university's campus to survey and ultimately build its border fence. According to news reports, the government's original proposal was to construct an 18-foot-tall fence on campus, placing the Fort Brown Memorial Golf Course and historic Fort Texas on the south side, literally splitting the campus in two.

However, in mid-March, the university and the government reached an agreement to hold off on any definite plans. The DHS will be allowed to survey the school grounds and secure control of the border on campus, but will work with the university to look at other alternatives to erecting a physical wall. As part of the agreement, the lawsuit was dismissed.

"I am worried," says Harwood. "I mean, it's not like our chess team players will be swimming across the river to get here, but I do worry that we won't be as desirable a place to come as we have been."

Clearly, it's no accident that UTB is surging to the top of the college chess world.

The university in Brownsville is one of only four colleges in the country that recruit players, have full-time coaches and dole out full scholarships to chess players. Not surprisingly, the other three — the University of Texas at Dallas, the University of Maryland Baltimore County and Miami-Dade College (which brought in Cubans) — all either finished ahead of or tied with UTB in last year's national championship ­tournament.

At most schools, such as Yale, Harvard or Stanford, chess is still a club sport. If a top chess master happens to enroll, wonderful; they have a good shot at fielding a competitive team. If not, no one at those universities is likely to lose much sleep.

But at UTB and the three other schools, chess is treated like the Holy Grail of big-time college sports.

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