Chess Program History

There are three parts to the Chess Program at UTD. The first to have developed was the Chess Club. In 1995 two students, Helen Kheyfets and Sam Craft, asked Dr. Tim Redman to become the faculty sponsor for the new Chess Club they wanted to form on campus. They had heard that Dr. Redman could play chess and he readily agreed and the Club was launched.

At the same time, Dr. Redman had begun conversations with then Undergraduate Dean Dennis Kratz and Provost Hobson Wildenthal about the possibility of offering academic scholarships that took chess playing skill into account. Chess offers an excellent symbol of the University of Texas at Dallas : intellectually rigorous, academically excellent, and successfully competitive. A winning Chess Team attracts favorable attention to UTD. By drawing on the national pool of high school chess players we find students who can meet our demanding entrance requirements. Finally, chess helps us to reach out to students in inner-city Dallas , helping them to bridge the gap that sometimes exists between their interests and backgrounds and our academic programs.

Our first chess scholars arrived in Fall of 1996 and we participated in our first Pan American Intercollegiate Chess Team Championship in Baltimore in 1996, finishing a respectable 9th place. Our successes continued. We've won three consecutive national titles by winning the National Collegiate Chess League, played over the internet, in 1999, 2000, and 2001. In Milwaukee in December 2000 we tied for first in the Pan American Intercollegiate with the University of Maryland ,Baltimore County , taking first place trophy on tiebreak. In April 2000 we won the first-even "President's Cup," the "Final Four" of collegiate chess, by defeating the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, and the University of Maryland, Baltimore Country in a round-robin match tournament. The addition of FIDE International Master Rade Milovanovic as Trainer for the Chess Team has greatly helped our recent success. He gives lessons to club members each Friday and team members during the week.

The third and most recent focus of the University of Texas Chess Program is on Chess and Education. Undergraduate Dean, Michael Coleman, started a new category of chess scholarships at UTD, competition scholarships in 1997. These awards, four-year, full-tuition-and-fees plus stipend, are given at selected scholastic tournaments each year. They carry with them the sole proviso that students winning them must meet our rigorous entrance requirements and keep their grades up after matriculation. The idea behind them is to encourage and reward chess activity while keeping students focused on academic accomplishment. In Texas they are given annually to the winner of the 6th-grade Championship of Dallas-Area-Chess-In-Schools, the winner of the Texas Scholastic Championship, the Texas 12th-Grade Championship, and, most recently, in memory of a greatly admired member of the Chess Team whose untimely death on September 1, 2000 saddened the entire chess community, to the winner of the Steven Grubbs Memorial Scholastic Championship.

Nationally, they are given each year to the winner of the Denker Tournament of High School Champions and the winner of the Pan American Scholastic Championship. Occasionally, these chess competition scholarships are given to the winners of USCF National Scholastic Championships -- the National Elementary in Dallas in Spring 2000, the winners of the National Elementary, the National Junior High, and the National High School Championships, the Super Nationals, in Kansas City in Spring 2001, and the National 12th-grade Champion in Dallas in December 2001.

Another part of our focus on Chess and Education began with our hiring of Dr. Alexey Root as Senior Lecturer in Education in the School of General Studies . Dr. Root serves as the Associate Director of the Chess Program and is in charge of recruiting. In Fall of 2000 we received a grant from UT TeleCampus, the component of the University of Texas System overseeing distance learning in the state, to develop two courses, Chess in the Classroom I: Elementary (Dr. Root) and Chess in the Classroom II: Cultural and Institutional Contexts (Dr. Redman), that will be offered, both on the undergraduate and graduate levels, starting in Fall 2001. General Studies Dean George Fair and the Provost have both strongly supported these courses.