Were it not for chess, Ray Robson might be just another boy genius. After completing sixth grade last year, the spindly 12-year-old began pursuing higher learning at his home in Largo, Florida, studying Mandarin with his mother and discussing literature with his father, a professor at St. Petersburg College. But by upsetting a slew of middle-aged chess opponents, Ray has distinguished himself from even the most exceptional American prodigies. “He directs his own chess studies; I can’t help him there,” says Gary Robson, Ray’s father.

Ray began playing chess at age three, after his father brought home a plastic chess-and-checkers set from the local Wal-Mart. Expecting his son to take to checkers, Gary was surprised when Ray easily grasped the complicated maneuverings of chess, and downright shocked when, a year later, Ray beat his old man for the first time. “I never let Ray win at anything,” Gary Robson says. “You should see our ping-pong battles. They’re ferocious.”

Since that time, Ray has worked tirelessly to improve: mastering state-of-the-art computer chess programs, amassing a library of 500 chess books, and studying under three different professional instructors. The hard work has paid off. With seven scholastic titles under his belt, Ray has finished in the top ten of the World Youth Chess Championships for the past three years, and tied for first place at the Pan American Youth Chess Championships for the past two. And just last year, Ray became the youngest player in history to qualify for the United States Chess Championships.

“He’s coming along well,” says James Stallings. Few people are more interested in Ray’s development than Stallings, who is director and head recruiter for the chess team at the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD). In April 2005, when Ray was ten years old, UTD awarded him a four-year scholarship. Ray had just won the scholastic Super National chess tournament in Nashville. “Ray Robson will cut you up and destroy you,” Stallings says today. “He’s probably the top talent in the U.S. right now.”

Chess prodigy Ray Robson was only ten years old when the University of Texas at Dallas awarded him a full scholarship. The school recruits aggressively for its chess team.

For his part, Ray—who sleeps under a blanket emblazoned with robots, space stations, dump trucks, tractors, and choo-choo trains—says he hasn’t spent much time reflecting on UTD’s offer. “I don’t ever think much about where I’m going to college,” Ray says. Still, when Stallings caught up with Ray and his father at the U.S. Chess Championship

in Stillwater, Oklahoma, this past May, he took the opportunity to tick off the reasons why Ray should matriculate at UTD—whenever he is ready for college. He’d have the chance to play with other world-class chess players, Stallings told him, live in on-campus apartments available exclusively to the chess team, and enjoy UTD’s excellent academic programs. Full tuition and fees, of course, are already taken care of.

"He's a real salesman," says Gary Robson.

Just like private businesses, American colleges and universities need familiar, reputable brand names to bring in revenue. But with elite academia already crammed with well-known institutions like Harvard and Stanford, smaller, regional universities must work hard to establish identities of their own. Over the years, in an effort to achieve national exposure and boost reputations, American universities have tried everything from hiring Nobel laureates to building championship basketball teams. Today, however, a small but growing number of colleges have come up with an unconventional brand-enhancer: building a winning chess team. Yes, chess.

In 1996, UTD launched an ambitious initiative to bring top-notch chess players from around the world to its suburban Dallas campus. These recruits, university officials believed, would do more for the school than simply rack up championships. By beating the nation’s elite universities at chess—a universal metaphor for cerebral competition—the team could burnish the academic credentials of the entire institution. “Chess is not just a game, but a symbol of academic pursuit,” says J. Michael Coleman, UTD’s dean of undergraduate education.

The ten tournament players representing UTD included two Serbians, a Costa Rican, an Indian, a Pole, a Zambian, a Croatian, and three Americans.

The university was founded by three executives from Texas Instruments in 1961 to train locals for engineering jobs at the company. Today, UTD has roughly 14,500 students and retains its focus on science, technology, engineering, and business education. But by handing out scholarships to world-class players in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the former Soviet Union, as well as to the winners of key scholastic chess tournaments in the United States, UTD quickly ascended to the summit of college chess. Since 2000, UTD has won or shared first place at the Pan American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship five out of seven times. (The Pan Am is the chess world’s equivalent of the NCAA Basketball Tournament.) And at the most recent Pan Am, in December of 2006, UTD walked off with both first and second place, as its “A’” and “B” squads both whipped the other 22 teams that participated. The ten players representing UTD included two Serbians, a Costa Rican, an Indian, a Pole, a Zambian, a Croatian, and three Americans. “It’s like being able to fight a war on two fronts,” Stallings says of UTD’s depth.

Stallings says his chess team’s annual budget is “a few hundred thousand dollars,” which goes toward travel and the salaries of a coach, a director, and an assistant director. Each of the 25 members of UTD’s current chess team is on some form of scholarship, which the university treats as an academic award, rather than an athletic grant, and which it finances through its general scholarship fund.

How is the strategy working? While it is impossible to measure precisely the chess team’s effect on UTD’s reputation, university officials couldn’t be more pleased. “Chess has served our purpose well; we are not the same university that we were ten years ago,” Coleman says. “It has brought us onto the national stage in terms of being a university that promotes intellectual character.”

The president of UMBC now regularly receives letters from proud alumni, congratulating him on the chess team's latest accomplishments, 'Some of the letters have checks in them.'

Although many Americans still associate chess with the towering libraries of Ivy League campuses, the country’s leading universities are no longer serious contenders for the national collegiate crown. Columbia University won three Pam Am tournaments in the 1950s and early 1960s, Yale won three in the 1970s and 1980s, and Harvard won two and tied for first in two in the 1980s and early 1990s. But today, college chess is ruled by a pair of unlikely powerhouses—UTD and UMBC (the official name of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County)—that have claimed every Pan Am championship for the past nine years.

“There really is no competition,” says Johnny Sadoff, a member of Harvard’s chess team. “Every year it’s UMBC or UTD—and a crap shoot for third and fourth place.”

“It’s almost impossible to compete at that level,” says Eric Ruben, the outgoing president of the Columbia Chess Club.

“If we were to win, it would be a miracle,” says David Lyons, the president of the Yale College Chess Club.

At most universities, chess remains a loosely organized club activity that receives little to no funding from the administration. However, UTD and UMBC have climbed to the top of the heap by using modern recruiting tactics to identify and obtain the best chess players in the world. But their success has embittered opponents, as some members of the collegiate chess establishment have criticized UTD and UMBC for using older, tournament-hardened players—some in their 30s and 40s—to mop up the rest of the field. “If there is any talk about controversy in the college chess world, this is the first thing that comes up,” Sadoff says.

But meanwhile, even as UTD and UMBC stoke criticism, a growing number of second- and third-tier universities have taken their lead and established chess programs of their own. These schools—which include Miami Dade College, Texas Tech University, and the University of Texas at Brownsville—are hoping that they too can use chess to achieve national recognition and boost their academic reputations.

Critics complained about the growing number of older chess wizards that were turning up on teams. These recruits—some in their 30s and 40s—easily whipped the teams comprising conventional undergraduates who represented most universities.

Although it was not the first American university to offer chess scholarships, UMBC turned the world of college chess on its ear by implementing a sophisticated recruiting program in the mid-1990s. Since that time, UMBC ’s president, Freeman A. Hrabowski III, has seen firsthand the benefits that a strong chess team can bring to a university. With 11,800 students, UMBC is one of 11 colleges in the Maryland public university system, and has long struggled to distinguish itself from other institutions in the state—particularly the University of Maryland at College Park, with which it is often confused. “As a rule, it’s very difficult to get visibility if you are not one of the top athletic schools,” Hrabowski says.

But through its chess team’s success, UMBC has finally been able to establish an identity of its own. “When I go around the country, people say, ‘Hey, you’re that chess powerhouse!’” Hrabowski says. “It’s a good way to be identified,…a wonderful symbol of the life of the mind.”

Meanwhile, UMBC’s chess team has attracted widespread media coverage in places like USA Today and on ESPN—exposure that, says Hrabowski, has prompted more high school students to consider attending UMBC. “There’s no doubt we’ve gotten more interest as we’ve gotten more publicity in newspapers and magazines about the chess team.” Even better, Hrabowski now regularly receives letters from proud UMBC alumni congratulating him on the chess team’s latest accomplishments. “Some of the letters have checks in them,” he says.

In quickly rising to the top of collegiate chess, UTD and UMBC took advantage of several factors that make creating a competitive chess program significantly less daunting than building a successful basketball or football team. For one, the universe is smaller. While 336 colleges and universities fielded NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball teams during the 2006–2007 season, only 16 schools had sufficient interest and funding to participate in the most recent Pan Am chess tournament.

Meanwhile, without expensive facilities or training equipment, fielding a national chess team is by no means expensive. “We don’t exactly spend a lot of money on cheerleaders or a marching band,” Stallings says.

In addition, since a chess team is composed of just four members, it takes only a couple of elite players to create a national contender. Few universities understand that better than Miami Dade College. Its program was established in 2002, when Rodelay Medina, a Cuban American studying computer science at Miami Dade, convinced a group of his college chess buddies to enter the Pan Am tournament, which was being held in Miami that year, as The Wall Street Journal has reported.

The first blue-chip recruit was William 'The Exterminator' Morrison. The 35-year-old Air Force veteran, who grew up playing for cash in Manhattan's chess district, had not yet finished his college degree.

The start-up community-college team stunned the college chess establishment by upsetting a handful of traditionally strong programs—including Princeton and the University of Chicago—to take third place in the tournament, behind UMBC and UTD. Since then, Miami Dade regularly places among the top finishers at key tournaments.

Like officials at UTD and UMBC , René Garcia, the Miami Dade team’s faculty adviser, has seen what chess can do for a university. “A community college is not always known as an academic institution, but doing well in an intellectual game certainly helps,” Garcia says. “Our college president loves to say, ‘Yes, we beat Harvard,’” he adds. “Every time we do, it goes out in a press release.”

When Alan T. Sherman arrived on campus in the fall of 1989, the UMBC chess team had never even entered a Pan Am tournament. And when it finally did, the following year, UMBC finished 26th out of 27 teams.

Sherman was asked to serve as the faculty adviser to the team in 1991, after he participated in a student-versus-faculty chess match. He immediately understood that coaching would have only a minimal impact, “but if I recruit a strong player, I can improve the team by an order of magnitude.” He got to work. While serving as a member of the graduate admissions committee of the Computer Science Department, he searched for applicants who listed chess as an interest. When he found one, Sherman sent him a handwritten note encouraging the student to enroll. “I was happily surprised that that extra little touch made a real impact on the yield,” Sherman says. Eventually, he convinced Ishan Weerakoon, a former chess champion from Sri Lanka, to accept a graduate teaching assistantship at UMBC.

Weerakoon would help lead UMBC’s chess team to a third-place finish in the 1993 Pan Am tournament. But after a disappointing fifth place finish the next year, Sherman decided to redouble his recruiting efforts. He had come to believe that only by winning the Pan Am tournament would the program have the credibility it needed to attract world-class players. But, of course, he needed strong players to win the tournament in the first place.

When identifying prospects, college chess recruiters have a distinct advantage over their counterparts in other sports. In its role as the game’s national governing body, the United States Chess Federation (USCF) assigns a numerical rating to every player who competes in a sanctioned event. These ratings—which are derived from complex algorithms that take into account wins, losses, strength of opponents, and other factors—provide college recruiters with a precise, objective measurement of a player’s performance.

A typical competitive chess player might have a rating of around 1350. Ray Robson is currently rated 2347. Players rated above 2500, who are known as “grandmasters,” are the game’s most prized recruits. (The UTD team that won the 2006 Pan Am had an average rating of 2500.)

The 'Coca-Cola Chess Fellowships' at UMBC provide a full tuition of $17,440 annually for out-of-state residents, plus $15,000 yearly stipend for grand-master-level players who meet certain academic requirements.

Sherman launched his revamped recruiting program in 1995. He placed an ad in Chess Life magazine inviting high school players with combined SAT scores above 1400 and chess ratings over 2000 to inquire about possible scholarships at UMBC. At the same time, he used information acquired from the USCF to send mailings that advertised UMBC’s commitment to chess to every single player under 19 years of age and rated above 2000. Next, he sent similar mailings to the top 100 finishers of the national high school chess championships that year.

Meanwhile, Sherman contacted the nation’s top high school chess coaches and suggested they send their standouts to UMBC. He also spread the word through postings on websites and online news groups that UMBC was looking for top-notch chess players. And, perhaps most important, Sherman persuaded the university to give a full tuition scholarship to the winner of the Maryland Scholastic Championship, which UMBC would host. In the spring of 1995, Sherman landed his first blue-chip recruit: William “The Exterminator” Morrison.

Then 35 years old, Morrison had been raised in New York City. As a youngster, he passed much of his time in Washington Square Park—the bustling heart of Manhattan’s chess district, which served as the backdrop for the 1993 film “Searching for Bobby Fischer.” Morrison came from a poor family, and gladly took money off unsuspecting opponents.

After dropping out of Morgan State University in Baltimore, Morrison served in the U.S. Air Force before falling back on chess to make ends meet. As he competed in regional tournaments, his reputation spread inside chess circles. In 1995 alone, Morrison won the chess championships of Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. “He doesn’t like to be referred to as a chess hustler; he considers himself a chess professional,” Sherman says.

That spring, Morrison turned up at the UMBC Open. Sherman, who knew him only by reputation, was excited to meet the chess talent in person. After learning that Morrison had not finished college, Sherman offered him a scholarship on the spot. Morrison, nearly twice as old as the typical entering freshman, accepted. “It was a big boost to the team,” Sherman says.

In the summer of 1996, UMBC picked up a crop of key recruits, including a 1996 national high school co-champion and two former members of the junior national team of Belarus, in the former Soviet Union. Led by Morrison, UMBC’s “A” and “B” teams took first and second place in the 1996 Pan Am Tournament. “That was the greatest competitive chess moment I’ve had at UMBC,” Sherman says. “It was the culmination of five years of effort.”

From there, UMBC’s chess program never looked back. Soon, elite players—even grandmasters—from all over the world began contacting Sherman about scholarship opportunities. At the same time, UMBC’s top players would encourage other strong chess players to join the team. “After 1996, people started calling me at a much higher rate.”

Eventually, the university administration even agreed to divert some of the money it receives from its contract with Coca-Cola, which pays a fee in return for UMBC’s selling only Coke products on campus, to establish what it calls “Coca-Cola Chess Fellowships.” Such scholarships provide full tuition—$17,440 annually for out-of-state residents, plus a $15,000 yearly stipend for grandmaster-level players who meet certain academic requirements.

Jerry Nash, the U.S. Chess Federation’s scholastic director, has watched a pair of divergent trends. Participation in scholastic chess has exploded over the last 20 years. In 1988, 1,621 high school students participated in federation-sanctioned tournaments. But by 2005, that number had jumped to 19,631. And that’s just those competing in formal events; the USCF estimates that for every student who plays in a federation event, nine others are playing informally. “Starting in the early 1990s and continuing, we’ve seen hundreds of thousands of kids get into scholastic chess,” Nash says.

He credits the enthusiasm of parents and teachers—excited by studies linking chess participation to higher math scores, improved critical thinking, and positive character development—for shepherding more students into the game. “Couple that with the fact that the kids love it,” Nash adds.

Alex 'The Surgeon' Sherzer stunned the collegiate chess community when he was arrested for allegedly attempting to solicit sex from a 15-year-old girl he met on the Internet. He was acquitted on the charges, but it came to light that, before enrolling at UMBC, he had already received a medical degree from a university in Hungary.

Over the same period, however, the number of players participating in collegiate chess has remained largely unchanged, but the level of talent has increased dramatically. Nash attributes this development to the recruiting efforts of the chess powerhouses. “Part of it has been those scholarships.” Nash says. “You’ve got schools that are actually going after the best players in the world because they want to win a championship.” The USCF lists 12 colleges and universities currently offering chess scholarships—but none recruits as aggressively as UTD and UMBC.

The increasing strength of the nation’s top teams has in some ways worked against college chess as a whole. Mid-level teams have grown frustrated by the dominance of UTD and UMBC, and Nash says he is now considering ways to prevent discouraged teams from walking away from the game altogether. “We have to create new categories so [mid-level teams] still have an opportunity to win prizes and championships.”

One way to get more universities involved in competitive chess is through the Internet. The USCF currently sponsors online individual and team collegiate chess tournaments each year, which allow players to participate without leaving campus. “The advantage of the [online] tournament is that it does not cost any money,” Stallings says. In a recent online tournament, 35 teams competed. “The future of chess will be Internet chess,” Sherman says. “But in terms of numbers it hasn’t yet really taken off.”

As UTD and UMBC ascended to the top of the collegiate chess world, they stirred enormous controversy. Critics complained about the growing number of older chess wizards that were turning up on the schools’ teams. These recruits—some in their 30s and 40s—easily whipped the teams comprising conventional Undergraduates who represented most universities.

In a 2002 article for a campus publication, Yuri Ashuev of the University of Chicago recalled his experiences at the 2001 Pan Am tournament. “The best we could hope for was third place. Why? The reason is that two otherwise unremarkable schools—University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) and University of Texas at Dallas (UTD)—dominate the collegiate chess arena. They are unique in the nation for giving scholarships to chess players,” he wrote.

Ashuev was particularly critical of UMBC’s use of older players, suggesting that some were on campus only to play chess. UMBC “enrolled the 40-year-old Polish Grand Master Alexander Wojtkiewicz. He was claimed to be a ‘language major with a full course load,’” Ashuev wrote. “In fact, the man is a consummate international chess professional, who won the U.S. Grand Prix in 2000 and 2001.”

Chess players from Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics are considered superior to their American counterparts, and have, naturally, become the focus of many collegiate chess recruiters. “Chess was essentially a national sport of the former Soviet Union,” Sherman says. “Most families would play chess, [and] it was promoted by the government in the schools. They would identify talented people and single them out for special instruction.” In addition, chess instruction is better in Eastern Europe than it is in the United States, Sherman says. “Of course, we are a melting pot, and a lot of Eastern European chess players live in the United States now, and many of them play on college teams.” Sherman says.

‘The Exterminator,’ an African American, also drew attention. Morrison was 43 years old when he finally left UMBC after playing on the chess team for eight years. But such controversy would pale in comparison to what happened next.

At the 2002 Pan Am Tournament, UMBC ’s “B” team upset its “A” team to win the title. (The “A” team, meanwhile, tied for second place with UTD.) The “B” team was anchored by Alex “The Surgeon” Sherzer, a 32-year-old grandmaster.

Several months later, in May of 2003, Sherzer would stun the collegiate chess community when he was arrested in Alabama for allegedly attempting to solicit sex from a 15-year-old girl he met on the Internet, according to wire services. He was acquitted of the charges, but because of the arrest, additional details came to light. Sherzer, who left UMBC before classes ended for an internship in Louisiana, had already received a medical degree from a university in Hungary.

The incident was a huge embarrassment for UMBC, as it appeared to reinforce charges that some students were attending the university simply to play chess. In response to growing criticism about older chess recruits, the USCF in 2004 instituted new eligibility rules that required certain top-rated players to be younger than 26 years old to play on a college team. The new regulations also limited players to six years of eligibility and required them to have at least a 2.0 grade point average. Students who were already playing when the rule change went into effect were grandfathered in under the old rules—which placed no restrictions on age or length of eligibility. (American collegiate chess is governed by the USCF College Chess Committee, not the NCAA—which has more stringent eligibility requirements for basketball and other sports it oversees.) While establishing an age ceiling for collegiate chess eligibility, the new rules did not create a floor. If Ray Robson, at 12, wanted to play for UTD, he could.

Meanwhile, officials at Texas Tech University in Lubbock have big chess plans of their own. In May of this year, the school announced the hiring of Susan Polgar, a four-time women’s world chess champion and five-time Olympic gold medalist, to help launch a unique program that would promote the study of chess while trying to make

Texas Tech a national championship contender. The initiative, known as the Susan Polgar Institute for Chess Excellence, or SPICE, will provide opportunities for Texas Tech professors to conduct academic research on issues relating to chess, such as the effect of chess on Alzheimer’s disease, or the way chess influences language development in children. But at the same time, university officials hope that Polgar’s presence will attract strong students and chess players to the university.

Texas Tech, which is currently the home of legendary basketball coach Bobby Knight, has traditionally been known less as an academic institution than as a strong sports school. But university officials are counting on chess to change all that. “The goal is to make Texas Tech as good academically as it is athletically,” says Jim Brink, senior vice provost for academic affairs.

But with more universities hunting for top prospects, the current rulers of the chess world aren’t about to stand still. Sherman is pressing UMBC’s administration for more scholarship funding. “You need more than just four major scholarships to support a team with only four players,” he says. “No head basketball coach would survive on five basketball scholarships a year.”

Meanwhile, in May, UTD announced that it had formed a partnership with the European Chess Union to offer two full scholarships to the male and female winners of this year’s European Youth Championship in Sibenik, Croatia. “We’ve upped the ante, so to speak. We’re not only getting our name out in Texas, we’re also getting our name out in Europe,” Stallings says.

“It’s where the best chess players are,” UTD’s Coleman says. “To get better at chess, you need to play against players that are very strong, [and] in this country there aren’t too many.”

Well, of course, there’s Ray Robson. He’s out there in Largo, Florida, under his robot and choo-choo train blanket, dreaming of chess.

Luke Mullins is an associate editor of U.S. News and World Report. His previous articles in THE AMERICAN were about Lou Dobbs and white-collar prisoners.