While a few team members are Texans or from parts north, others hail fromSerbia, Russia, India, Costa Rica and as far away as Mongolia. The game's big there, which makes overseas a fertile recruiting ground for Stallings, which in turn helps him with one of his chief jobs, promoting UTD as a place for smart people. Well, they might have to travel to Eastern Europe.
Where else, he asks, can Dallas chess heads find so many masters of chess in one spot? During Friday team practice sessions, community members and families will occasionally drop by to seek a game.
There is, however, a couple with their young daughter, Stallings points out.
No temperamental asocial geniuses of movie and television scripts. There are no freaks, geeks or emotionally fragile eccentrics muttering to themselves and stalking off to sulk in a corner. government.) There may be the odd sort hidden among the tables at UTD, but by all appearances, they're perfectly average-looking Texas college students who just happen to be way above average. Searching for Bobby Fischer? (So was the U.S. On a recent sunny Friday afternoon in a huge, brightly lit conference room on campus, team members were chatting above the click of timers and pieces landing on checkered boards, and everyone looked so. "We have the reputation now" to attract top players, Stallings says, making the chess team UTD's equivalent of the Longhorns for UT-Austin, though probably with a lot less emotional baggage than the stereotypical student athlete. That's even more ambitious than it sounds, since UTD was created in part to help provide local brainpower for Texas Instruments, so it's already drawing from the high end of students scholastically, says chess program director James Stallings. A little NFL humor there.)Īnother large part of Milovanovic's job is ensuring that his team members, who receive a mix of academic and chess scholarships, maintain a minimum 3.25 GPA. Managing unpredictability is part of a chess coach's job-scouting the opposition to match his players to opponents with complementary strategies, picking a lineup, arranging travel and practices and videotaping opposing teams' defensive signals. Milovanovic says his family's chief request when they were resettled from Bosnia in 1998, apart from medical care for an ill daughter, was "someplace not too cold." (Again, Dallas, go with your strengths.) Figuring that in his 40s he was too old to retrain for a law career here, he took menial jobs before meeting up with Tim Redmond, founder of UTD's chess program, whose team needed a coach. Sort of like chess, life is unpredictable." "After that I wouldn't imagine I would live in Dallas. "Sometimes life is very strange," says Milovanovic, whose chief memory of Dallas before moving here was as a boy in 1963 in Yugoslavia hearing news in school that John F. A good one too, a former lawyer in the former Yugoslavia and international grand master chess player whose family moved to Dallas in 1998 as refugees from civil war. UTD chess coach Rade Milovanovic has certainly coached his share of them in a program that has brought in a string of championships while boosting the international reputation of a school and.wait a minute again, you say. National collegiate champions-there are some words you're not likely to hear applied to a local college football team anytime soon, so let's go with our strengths and call chess a sport. Listen, if outsmarting a fish or some guy in plaid pants counts as sport, why shouldn't concentrating intensely over a chess board for four or more hours at a stretch against some of the best collegiate players in the world count too? Still not convinced? Then consider this, the University of Texas at Dallas' Chess Team took first and second place in the last Pan American Intercollegiate Championship and first place in the National Collegiate Championship.
Lewis Carroll may have had chess on his mind when he wrote Through the Looking Glass, but the game isn't a sport, so why does a chess team rank a story in a Best of Dallas sports section? You're right.