LAJ: Tech creates chess institute Options

[Aaron]

Deep in the land of Frito pie and high school football, a grandmaster will launch her latest gambit.

Susan Polgar announced during a Saturday commencement speech at Texas Tech the creation of the Susan Polgar Institute for Chess Excellence, or SPICE, at the university.

Officials related to the project believe it is unique among programs in the world, sporting an ambitious array of research programs and headed by a world champion player.

From her base at Texas Tech, the chess celebrity hopes to research the ties between scholastic chess and academic achievement, develop new software and build, of course, an elite collegiate team.

She leaves an established metropolitan chess community to do this, choosing a city where schoolchildren dominate the game. There is no centralized chess club in Lubbock and no city tournament.

But Lubbock has no attitudes on the game to change, Polgar said. And the university hopes chess will help find and entice strong students from around the world as supporters believe the number of young U.S. players will soon swell.

“Huh? You’re moving off to where?” her husband, Paul Truong, said, laughing while trying to predict the reaction from the rest of the chess community.

“And that will be a good thing, because it will create curiosity,” he said. “They will know that if Susan agrees and committed to do this, there must be something there.”

The small circle familiar with Polgar’s recruitment compare the professional chess player to men’s basketball coach Bobby Knight — a household name and a winner who brought overnight attention to Texas Tech.

Polgar is the top women’s chess player in the U.S. and in 2005 was ranked second in the world, behind her younger sister, Judit. With her sisters, she represented Hungary in the women’s chess Olympiad as children, snapping a 10-year winning streak held by a dominant U.S.S.R. team with back-to-back victories in 1988 and 1990. The Soviets had lost only once before in the 40-year history of the competition.

She was the first woman to earn a men’s grandmaster ranking and reigned as Women’s World Champion from 1996 to 1999. April rankings posted her at 212 in the world for men and women.

That, with the instructional books and videos, a foundation promoting chess education for girls and a girls’ invitational tournament, make her a prominent figure in an international sport.

But while quick to note the academic strengths of their current student athletes, Tech administrators liked the ring of a chess team. Tech has been a football school and a basketball school — a chess school separates the university from the rest of the country’s established sports programs in a game evocative of scholarly strength.

“Obviously, universities are looking for students that have the kind of skills that chess players have,” said Jerry Nash, scholastic director for the U.S. Chess Federation and its liaison to the sport’s international organization. “They’re saying, 'Yes, gosh, we can have teams that can compete, but in addition to that, we’re getting the kinds of students that we need.”

Tech offers Polgar a chance to build a program from the ground up, focused on her priorities — chess and education, chess and computers, girls in chess — all of which administrators believe will attract widespread attention to Tech.

There have been early discussions with high-speed computing and programming faculty about building competitive chess software or tools that could link schools together for chess instruction, faculty said. The university was in late April bidding to host elite collegiate tournaments that would bring top players from around the country to Lubbock.

Polgar will be the face of Tech at myriad high school tournaments filled with high-achieving prospective students and will assist in the university’s fundraising efforts.

And then there are the benefits for the home team. Tech will have an expert chess player for its students to study under and one that will attract other younger masters who will seek out her instruction.

“Of course, one of the main ideas is to build, hopefully, a championship-winning team for Tech,” Polgar said. “And that would get a lot of positive publicity and enhance the image around the world of Texas Tech.”

Strong chess programs exist at U.S. colleges, but most focus on fielding teams. The University of Texas at Dallas and the University of Maryland at Baltimore County are described as perennial successes by followers of collegiate chess — another 41 universities have at least one team.

Many are smaller schools that do not host major sports programs. Chess doesn’t need an arena or multimillion-dollar stadium, and coaches don’t command the enormous salaries of those in high-profile sports. UT Dallas’ coach, an international master, is part time, said Jim Stallings, the university’s program director.

But like major college sports, chess attracts media attention. National wire services noticed when teams of students from Brownsville’s public schools placed high in major tournaments, and the attention netted them a mention in a speech from the U.S. secretary of education, UT Brownsville chess program director Russell Harwood said. The New York Times surprised Tech with interest in the university’s new chess scholarships. Tech has tried for two years to break into national media.

The interest is international. Recruiting for chess teams crosses continents, and rosters for the top squads bear few domestic names. Miami Dade, an upstart community college in Florida that bested Ivy League teams, is mostly Cuban; Maryland and UT Dallas, this year’s champion of U.S. chess’s top collegiate tournament, are flush with young Eastern European masters.

Chess scholarships aren’t commonly offered abroad, so U.S. schools have found that strong teams are an easy way to entice top international students, Stallings said.

But the international focus may soon change. Stallings believes next year’s freshmen for his team would be mostly American. Superintendents and parents across the country are asking the U.S. federation how to start their own programs as high test scores from districts that have chess teams come in, Nash said.

If college teams can grow, younger students studying chess in elementary school or middle school will have a reason to continue, he said. Universities feed the interest by training teachers who use chess and providing a community of strong players for younger students to look up to, Nash said.

“We are, I think, on the verge of an explosion.”

Tech wants to reach into both pools — national and domestic.

“It’s obviously a niche opportunity for us — this is not something where we’re coming in the wake of another Big 12 school,” said vice-provost Jim Brink. “These are areas where we could very profitably use chess as a pathway to bring those students to Texas Tech.”

All of this delights Haraldur Karlsson, the soft-spoken Tech associate professor who has pushed the university’s chess program forward for the past five years. The native Icelander watched a tournament in his hometown in 2002 and wondered, Why not here?

All involved credited Karlsson with bringing the institute together — Truong said they would not be coming to Lubbock if not for his work.

And so the Tech program has transformed from a club, to a team, to something those involved consider revolutionary — an institute based at a university headed by a professional chess player.

“It’s kind of like a dream,” Karlsson said. “I have to pinch myself.”

I think it's pretty neat that we've seen so much movement here in the last six months (Thank you, Kent Hance) to establish Tech as a leader in various areas. Like this chess deal and the Vietnamese Institute that will be opening in the near future. Now, if we can only wriggle into the PUF or something similar we'd be friggin' set.

[FORSAKENR320]

one question::


why the fuck does chess need seperate men and women tournaments?!!!

[James]

Because the intellectual capacity of men is far superior to the intellectual capacity of women, of course!

You needed this explained to you because why???

[impala454]

yes

wind engineering, now chess!