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washingtoncitypaper.com February 2021 7

Bison’s Gambit

How a recent Howard University alum revived the school’s chess program

Sultan-Diego LeBlond

By Kelyn Soong

@KelynSoong

Wherever Sultan-Diego LeBlond

goes, a chess club follows. Or maybe that’s just how it feels. Chess is that significant a part of the 25-year-old’s identity.

Instead of asking his parents for video games for his birthday in middle school, LeBlond wanted a new chess board. At Northwest High School in Germantown, joining the chess team helped LeBlond make friends and competing in tournaments took him out of Maryland for the first time. While studying for his associate’s degree in business at Montgomery College’s Germantown campus, LeBlond revived the school’s dormant chess club and became the team’s president. In 2015, he co-founded the Germantown Library chess club, where he would teach the game to children.

“I know what chess has done for me in my life,” LeBlond says. “And I knew what it has done for me, it could do for other people.”

By the time he arrived at Howard University as a transfer student in the fall of 2017, LeBlond had established himself as a seasoned chess player and organizer, but he didn’t immediately join the school’s chess club. That’s because one didn’t exist. It didn’t take long for LeBlond to change that.

In the spring of 2019, he helped Howard University officially re-activate its chess club, which had not been operating for years, with assistance from Nisa Muhammad, the school’s assistant dean for religious life (who is now the club’s adviser), and other chess enthusiasts LeBlond met on campus.

Last month, the fledgling team competed at the 2020-2021 Pan American Intercollegiate Championship, the biggest collegiate chess tournament of the year, and finished at the top of its division and 45th out of 59 teams overall. The three-day event was held virtually on chess.com and at a later date than usual. One of Howard’s members, senior Azeezah Muhammad, an unrated player heading into the tournament, scored the largest upset of the championships by beating a player with a rating in the 1200s. The United States Chess Federation uses a rating system ranging from 100 to nearly 3000; the higher the number, the stronger the player.

“It came by like a shock,” says LeBlond, who graduated from Howard last year and now serves as the club’s volunteer head coach. “We were just playing to have fun and coming in with no expectations. And so we was caught like way off guard. But at the same time, I was confident in everybody’s capabilities ... Anything can happen in a game of chess.” The history of chess at Howard University dates back more than a half-century. Digital copies of the school’s yearbook, The Bison, reveal that students participated in a chess club as early as the 1940s. There’s been an official chess club at the school “off and on” for decades, says David Mehler, president and founder of the nonprofit U.S. Chess Center located in Silver Spring.

Mehler’s father taught at Howard and Mehler himself has seen several iterations of the Howard chess club, including a team that reached “reasonably high levels” in the early 2000s. That club eventually dissolved due to lack of interest, Mehler says. And according to the university, before this year the team last competed at the Pan-Am Championship in 2005.

“I’m hopeful that with the success that the team just had, that will generate a lot more interest,” Mehler says.

Michele Bennett didn’t know about this history when she arrived at Howard University. Bennett, a sophomore, learned how to play chess from her father around the age of 8 and competed in a couple tournaments in her hometown of Las Vegas while in elementary school. She didn’t play once she got to middle school and hadn’t really thought about chess until she started college.

During her freshman year, Bennett was reading messages on the school’s GroupMe when a post about a chess club caught her attention. She reached out for more information and eventually attended the weekly practices. Less than a year later, she was elected the club’s president.

“I kind of forgot how much I love chess,” she says. “It awakened my love for chess.”

What started as a group of around a halfdozen members has evolved into a club with a group chat of more than 100 people and weekly meetings and practices that draw around 20 active members, Bennett says. Even