Chess Masters at UT-Brownsville

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.

"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.