It was amazing!

Texas Tech’s Knight Raiders chess team cemented its reputation as an emerging chess dynasty Sunday when it grasped the program’s first national championship at the chess world’s equivalent of the NCAA Final Four basketball tournament.

The team, consisting of four players and an alternate, upset top-ranked powerhouses University of Maryland-Baltimore County and the University of Texas at Dallas, the two schools that have dominated the tournament since it opened 11 years ago.

Paul Truong, one of the team’s coaches at Tech’s Susan Polgar Institute for Chess Excellence, said the weekend’s victory came as a surprise to the team. Tech qualified for the tournament as one of the top finishers at December’s Pan-American Intercollegiate Chess Championship in Milwaukee, but it entered this weekend’s tournament as the fourth, and lowest, seed.

Players hoped to repeat or improve on last year’s third-place showing, he said, but a week ago the team would not have predicted a championship trophy.

“We edged them out by half a point,” Truong said.“UT-Dallas has been ruling the chess program for the past decade. For us to catch up with them on this level, this fast, was pretty amazing.”

This year marked the Knight Raiders’ second showing at the national tournament, Truong said, so the odds were stacked against their taking first place.

Tech narrowly clinched the championship during the two-day tournament’s third, and final, round of play.

“It was amazing,” said team captain Davorin Kuljasevic, a graduate student and chess grandmaster from Croatia. “We were the underdogs. Nobody expected us to win. We were the lowest-rated team. It was a big surprise.”

Polgar, as the team’s head coach, also made history as the first female coach to win a Division I title.

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