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BROWNSVILLE — Just like other college sport dynasties such as Nick Saban’s Alabama football or Geno Auriemna’s University of Connecticut Women’s basketball, the UTRGV Chess Program has established itself as a powerhouse in the sport and is looking to add another title competing in this year’s Final Four of Collegiate Chess this weekend.
In a send off celebration at the UTRGV Brownsville campus, the chess team featuring Viktor Gazik, Irakli Beradze, Shawn Rodrigue-Lemieux and Gleb Dubin, which is led by chess head coach Bartek Macieja, is marking the team’s sixth trip to the Final Four since 2013.
The chess team will face the University of Missouri, UT Dallas and reigning champion Webster University on March 30-31 in Richardson, Texas as it hopes to win its fourth championship in less than a decade.
The team achieved a three-peat with three consecutive championships in 2018, 2019 and 2021.
Last year, the team advanced to the Final Four but came up short finishing third.
Macieja, who has been the head coach for the team since the days of legacy institution University of Texas Brownsville, said being in the top four teams to compete for the championship almost every year is a great achievement and shows the students’ motivation.
Asked what has kept the program going strong for this many years, he said it’s a result of several factors.
Macieja said one reason is the great students in the chess team always posting high GPAs and excelling in their other endeavors on campus.
The other is the support from UTRGV and the local community for the chess program.
“Everybody cheers for us and always wishes us success and they feel like partially it’s their success,” he said. “I’m very glad to see that attitude and how they treat our chess team as part of them.”
Two weekends ago, the chess program hosted the 2024 South Texas State Scholastic Championships on the UTRGV Edinburg campus which had over 1,000 students from across 117 school districts showcase their chess skills.
Macieja said it gives the team additional motivation when representing UTRGV and the Valley chess community when they compete.
He added that employees across the university also play a huge part in helping the team find success such as the UTRGV Office of International Admission and Student Services helping some of the chess players solve some of their problems and letting them focus on the sport.
Dubin, a psychology sophomore from Russia and a grandmaster, said he is very excited to compete in this year’s Final Four after last year’s third place finish.
He said the team has increased practicing in preparation for the competition and has a good feeling that the team is capable of doing great things.
Asked if he could describe this year’s team with one word, Dubin said, “Spiritual.”
“We have great team spirit together,” he said. “We support each other … It definitely makes it much easier to play when you know somebody is holding your back basically.”
Feeling some of the pressure to take UTRGV back to championship glory, Dubin said the team is capitalizing on mistakes the team made last year.
Macieja said, truthfully, the team is not the favorite to win it all but the group is embracing the underdog mentality just like the chess program did when it won three consecutive titles and was not the favorite to win those championships.
“We’re not afraid to play against a theoretically stronger opponent because sometimes when you play against those stars, you get paralyzed and they defeat you not because they played better but because you couldn’t play at your normal level but … we do very well with (the underdog mentality) and we try our best every time,” he said.
Understanding the difficulty of winning the championship and competing with strong teams, Macieja said he does not put the expectation on his students to win it all but reminds them of the championship run back in 2018 and how they are in a very similar situation and could pull off the upset.
