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Chess Masters at UT-Brownsville

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"Instead of recruiting basketball or football players," says Susan Polgar, a Grand Master and head of the Susan Polgar Institute of Chess Excellence at Texas Tech University, "they've been putting an emphasis on chess."

Harwood wholeheartedly agrees, saying there is very little difference between the way he goes after chess players compared to how other, larger schools recruit point-guards and 300-pound linemen.

"Chess is a big part of our identity here," he says. "At UTB, we're not even NCAA in sports, we're NAIA. We've got volleyball, soccer, baseball, golf and that's it. And chess is the only area where we can compete at the highest level."

When the average person thinks about college jocks, broad stereotypes of meatheads smashing beer cans on each other's head and prima donnas too dumb to read can come to mind. When picturing a chess team, it would be understandable to envision a bunch of straight-A math geeks and introverted wimps who've never gotten laid toting around ivory chessboards everywhere they stray. But at UTB, at least the latter stereotype appears to be untrue.

It's about 1 p.m. on a Tuesday in Axel Bachmann and Daniel Fernandez's dorm room and all the window shades are drawn. Dirty laundry is strewn all about and covers virtually every surface in the room. Bachmann is standing next to his bed, which sports only a top sheet, while he tosses clothes and papers off a small table, revealing a seldom-used plastic chessboard. No fancy alabaster chess set here; the only thing these players carry with them might be a laptop computer. Across the room, Fernandez, a senior, is rolling around in bed wearing nothing but a pair of boxers. He is trying to sleep one off after a rough night out. Okay, he may have been out drinking with an Uzbeki chess player from the University of Maryland Baltimore County who was in town for spring break, but still, he was out party­ing nonetheless.

It seems like just another morning in the life of these two average college kids who happen to be great at chess.

"One of the perceptions of chess players is that they are out of this world," says Bachmann. "We have a problem with that in this sport, because our main players, the most important players in the sport, they are really crazy. So we have the image, but we are very different from that. We're pretty normal. We don't sit there talking to ourselves all alone and all of that."

Another perception that is somewhat untrue is that all chess players are terrific scholars. And in this respect, Harwood and coach Gilberto Hernandez share the same concerns of any Big 12 or ACC athletic director. They all deal with students who love to play their sport and don't always put their studies first.

"It's not quite like people would think," says Harwood, "that they're automatically going to be great students. Some have been more focused on chess than academics, especially the stronger players, because they're working on titles. Most are good students, but they are not necessarily great students."

During the summers and even somewhat during the school year, players such as Bachmann play numerous tournaments abroad, the only way to keep their rankings high. Plus, they play on their countries' national teams, competing in the chess Olympiad every two years. Like any college athlete, they miss classes from time to time to compete and dream of one day turning pro.

But to be fair, Harwood says, the team's overall grade point average does hover around a 3.0.

Overall, though, experts look at top-flight chess teams as win-win for both players and the schools.

"The universities are targeting students they'd want anyway," says Jerry Nash, scholastic director for the United States Chess Federation, which oversees college chess. "But the added benefit is that now they have a team, a means of acquiring national and international attention that they wouldn't have achieved otherwise. Let's face it, UTB or UTD is not going to ever have a nationally ranked football team. But at the same time, UTD was mentioned in Sports Illustrated, and UTB has been recognized in national educational circles and on the national news. And how expensive is a chessboard? Not that much. And the injury rate is a lot lower than in football."

When UTB president Juliet Garcia sits down at a University of Texas System conference, she lands smack dab between UT Austin and UT Dallas alphabetically.

"Dallas's entering freshman have to have higher SAT scores than Austin's," she says. "They're the nerd school. And then there's Austin with all the Nobel Prize winners. Well, guess who we compete against in chess? I can't be bigger than them, I'm not going to be richer...how else would this little university get on the map?"

Garcia looks at her school's chess team as far more than just a way to get some attention, though. For her, it's an opportunity to talk about much larger issues.

"People don't expect this population — South Texas, Hispanics, first generation, free-lunch and all of these things that are considered negative characteristics — to succeed at chess," she says. "It's counterintuitive. So what I've discovered is it's a powerful mechanism for talking about diminished expectations. And if it can signal to our country and to our state that there's nothing wrong with the human capital in Texas, you don't have to be afraid that a demographic shift is occurring. Because, guess what? If you educate the Hispanic population, they can do as well if not better. After all, we did beat Stanford and Yale this year."
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Nadya Ortiz remembers being 14 and standing on the street corner in front of her house in Ibague, Colombia, when she heard a gunshot ring out. Growing up, this was not an unfamiliar sound; drugs and violence were always not far away, but this time the noise seemed much closer than usual.

When she turned the corner, she saw that someone had just executed a taxi driver in broad daylight.

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