Entire Texas Tech Red Raider Team Transfers

Collegiate chess is actually a pretty sordid affair in recent history. There are a lot of questionable shenanigans that go in on college recruiting and athletics, but chess may take the cake. UT-Dallas started offering full ride scholarships to strong players and winners of state tournaments in the mid to late 90’s, and in that way it became a kind of extension of the boom in scholastic tournaments and play in Texas during that period.

UMBC (University of Maryland Baltimore County) was the other big player during that period, and it quickly became an arms race of sorts. The prize of course was making a name and claim to fame for your otherwise unremarkable small school, and for whatever reason these schools and probably others decided to really get after it.

Soon enough, it seemed like every chess program was being filled with whatever random talent they could cobble together. Plenty of international grandmasters were brought over under the premise of an international green card or whatnot, then were enrolled in the school and paid to play despite never really ever going to class.

I turned down one such UTD full ride in 2000 or so, many thanks again to my folks for footing the bill to go wherever I wanted to go. It turned into a raw deal for many of my friends and other people that I knew, either through their own decisions or some questionable ethics from the schools. A lot of people eventually dropped out from poor grades, others got obsessed with poker when that craze took off in 2002 or so. A few that stayed in school were more or less forced out due to poor chess performance to make room for these import ringers.

It’s low end stuff, for sure. In a mess of collegiate non revenue generating activities, competitive chess scholarships are probably right near the top of the list in terms of waste. The lengths to which some schools went to win was really extraordinary though. I haven’t been in the loop on it much after about 2005, but it seems to still be full of life and just as dirty.

My first summer at UT (‘67), my trig/analyt instructor was Dan Mauldin. Dan as a junior had been a captain on Texas’s ’63 national championship football squad. He was also captain of the Texas chess team that won the national title. I always thought that was a pretty high-testimony twofer.