Would being a good chess player be a good "hook"?

Dad_of_3
Sun, 15 Nov 2009 23:03:18 +0000

UMBC (univ maryland baltimore county) and UT Dallas are two schools that do give chess scholarships. However your USCF rating in the 1700s is way too low to matter. I knew someone who was ranked in the top 10 in the country who got a UT Dallas scholarship by winning a K-6 open (2200+ by the time he graduated).

He was quite disillusioned by the chess scene there, though. His opinion was that while the school really was focussed on being the best chess school in the country, they really spent their resources on the East European kids, and while there were several Americans who had scholarships, he said they didn’t spend much to develop them further.

My S, who was briefly the state champ in his younger days, didn’t try to score points saying how good he was at it. Rather he used it to illustrate two points: one was about starting a chess club in our local library which he ran for four years, and the joys of seeing little kids and their parents as the celebrated winning trophies in local tournaments. The second was about how his childhood experiences of beating adults in chess tournaments while he was in 2nd or 3rd grade helped him understand that adults weren’t better than kids in everything at an earlier age than his peers.